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NephJC: GMT chat slightly delayed this week

In case you were all wondering where the EU/African leg of the PD/CHF #NephJC chat disappeared, it will be held - albeit with a week's delay - on Wednesday June 3rd. It is all for a good reason. It has been quite busy for the Europeans this week - as you must have seen with all the furious tweeting from Charlie Tomson, Daniel McGuinness, David Arroyo, and many more including our very own Paul Phelan (who also wrote some excellent AJKD blog posts).

But, better late than never - and we hope many of you join us this week for the PD/CHF #nephjc chat.

Need any more evidence that #NephJC rocks?

You may have seen the evidence pyramid before, with animal studies and case reports at the bottom, and systematic reviews on the top. 

Well, an interesting paper was published a few days ago, in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Go ahead, click on that link and check it out. 

It is a systematic review of all twitter-based journal clubs (and they seem to have captured all that were existing at that time). They have then examined the impact of these journals clubs using many different metrics. Interestingly, the one that immediately stands out is in table 2:

Table 2 from Roberts et al, http://www.jmir.org/2015/4/e103/

Table 2 from Roberts et al, http://www.jmir.org/2015/4/e103/

There's only one journal club with over a million impressions. Take a bow, all of you who have ever participated in a #NephJC chat!

The paper does make for interesting reading, apart from what we mention above. Some of the analyses agrees with our thoughts after the first dozen #nephJC chats

NephJC 22: GMT chat

The American chat (mostly by virtue of its longevity) still has more participants and tweets, but the GMT (EU/African) chat makes up by being fun and entertaining. Tom Oates, Paul Phelan, Francesco and their merry band of tweeters make for delightful reading. Jungle Juice, scud missiles and more. See some highlights below


Analytics
Transcript

#NephJC number 22 is in the can.

Archive
analytics

The BK nephropathy discussion was interesting. No one was interested in further exploring quinolone for BK, which I guess indicates that this was a compelling study.

All and all it was a very interesting discussion and I learned a lot.

Storify forthcoming.

from NephJC live to the Lancet

You might remember Perry Wilson, the young dapper nephrologist from Yale who presented his trial on AKI alerts at NephJC live a few months ago. He was tweeting as @nephrolalia - and has now renamed and rebranded himself as @methodsmanmd, which is quite apt given his recent blog posts and succinct and snappy videos up at MedPage Today

More notably, the data he presented at #NephJC live has been published today - with some great additional analyses, in the Lancet. We sure know how to pick winners - so the next time we come calling, pick up the phone!

Tweet of the Week: Urine Eosinophils and NephroCheck

Dr. Faubel nailed the best comment about NephroCheck by reminding us while we pick apart the particulars of NephroCheck that we have some other dragons to slay:

And then Edgar slides in with the appropriate #NephPearl (How does he do that so fast?)

#NephJC 20: Who checks the checkers? Storify Part 1: EST chat

Last night we were off to a rollicking start with a great #NephJC chat - in great part due to the participation of Azra, Jay and Sarah! Joel took no time - burning the candle at both ends to do some storifys. 


archive

Here is the entire unedited archive with all the tweets from both chats:



Topic 0: Introduction, and How we do diagnose AKI?

Topic 1: Discussing DISCOVERY, SAPPHIRE and TOPAZ

 

Topic 2: ROC Curves and Diagnosing Aki with Nephrocheck

 

Topic 3: What happens now?

 

The GMT chat today was also very intense - Storify will follow shortly!

New for NephJC tonight: Topics

In case you haven't signed up for our mailing list (really - why not? go there and do it now!)  - We are going deep on the FDA approved NephroCheck™, a new test for the early diagnosis of AKI. This is not industry sponsored BS, just honest, crowd-sourced, EBM.

For this #NephJC we have three topics we want to discuss:
 

*please preface your tweets with the topic: i.e. T0, T1 and so on*


Topic Zero: How are you currently diagnosing AKI?

  • Is it all FENa and a microscope slide? 
  • What do you think of the KDIGO AKI stages?
  • How do you use oliguria?

Topic 1: Evaluate their strategy for developing a novel test for AKI.

Three studies in 2 papers:

  1. Discovery: the scientists tested 340 biomarkers and came up with a pair that performed best. N=522.

  2. Sapphire: validated the biomarker from Discovery in a unique cohort. N=744.

  3. Topaz: A separate study just to validate the results of Sapphire. N=420.

Is this a compelling story line? Is this a fair way to discover and validate a test? Do you agree with the conclusions?

Topic 2: Evaluating a test.

  • On ROC the area under the curve was 0.82. Good enough?
  • Two cutoffs are provided, one is sensitive (92%) and the other is specific (95%). How will you use that?

Topic 3: So what?

  • How will having a 12 hour lead time change your management?
  • Should we expect trials designed to change the course of AKI to use NephroCheck™?

GMT NephJC gaining steam

Tom Oates and his merry gang of GMT chatters shattered previous records for the Euro/Afro chat. Great work guys!

Not quite up to the pace of the western hemisphere, but gaining fast.

In a related note, NephJC.com reached 4,000 page views in a month for the first time in January. 

Tweet of the night

We had a great NephJC last night. We had a new contributor who was excellent, Eric Weinhandl of Minnesota.

Dr. Weinhandl works with the new PEER Kidney Care Initiative. It looks like a cool project. Here is some press from Nephrology News and Issues.

NephJC does RSS

RSS feed users

If you like subscribing to RSS feeds to get updates - we now make it easy to subscribe to our blog feed. 

Click on this link and it will allow you to subscribe easily using your choice of reader.  

If You Don't Know What RSS Stands for and Would Like to Know

RSS (Rich Site Summary - or really simple syndication as it is known more popularly) refers to a family of web formats that is used to publish information for frequently updated web sites, like blog posts, newspaper headlines and journals. Subscribing to a website RSS removes the need for the user to manually check the website for new content. In addition, by entering these 'feeds' into an aggregator or feed reader (Feedly is our current favourite - since Google decided to nix Google Reader), you will have all that content 'pushed' to you, notifying you of new posts. That's our secret to knowing the latest article published in Lancet. Look for this icon to find RSS feeds for your favourite website:

rssfeedicon

There are many advantages to using RSS feeds - you can get all the content you consume into one 'reader' i.e. news, medical journals, blogs etc. And, in addition, you can skim the headline, or the abstract - and decided if you want to click the link to read the full article in the original website. Enjoy!