SUMMIT and heart failure with preserved ejection fraction

I found the funding declarations worth reading, not as an accusation, but because they tell you what question somebody was paying to have answered.

My favourite session here was the one where we read a paper and concluded it did not support the thing everybody had been citing it for.

Something worth knowing: the follow-up periods in most of what we read are short relative to how long people actually take these things.

Thank you. Genuinely.

Something practical: I read the methods before the conclusions now, which somebody here suggested and which changed how much I trust what I read.

The thing I look at first now is who was actually in the study, because that is usually where the answer to my question lives.

What I found is that the abstract and the results section quite often tell slightly different stories, and the difference is the interesting part.

My honest position is that the evidence base for the main compounds is genuinely substantial and the evidence for a great deal else is not.

The withdrawal numbers in a trial usually tell you more about tolerability than the tolerability section does.

Something I got wrong early was reading a single paper as an answer. It is one piece of evidence and it usually raises three questions.

Here, reading, and glad you posted.

I would say do read the supplementary material occasionally. Twice now the thing I wanted to know was only in there.

The paper we read last month had a population nothing like most of this circle, which does not make it useless and does limit what it tells us.

The trial that gets quoted most in general coverage is not the one that answers most of the questions people here actually have.