JAMA Clinical Reviews

Cardiologist and JAMA Deputy Editor Greg Curfman, MD, discusses the many changes in the new AHA/ACC/HRS atrial fibrillation guidelines with University of Chicago cardiologists Gaurav Upadhyay, MD, and Francis Alenghat, MD, PhD. Major changes include recommendations for the use of various agents for anticoagulation, catheter ablation, and left atrial appendage occlusion. Read the article: Management of Patients With Atrial Fibrillation Index of content: 2:19 Summary of the new ACC/AHA Atrial Fibrillation Guideline 8:04 Cost and efficacy of NOACs used to treat atrial fibrillation 11:42 Preference for specific NOACs 14:00 Rate vs rhythm control 20:00 How catheter ablation is performed 26:20 Anticoagulation requirements following ablation 31:23 How to achieve rate control 32:25 Left atrial appendage occlusion devices 36:29 New lifestyle recommendation 37:44 More about rate vs rhythm control

Almost nothing is more controversial than gun control in the United States. Yet while passions flare and legislators posture but do little, deaths from gun violence are all too common. Almost every proposal put forward to address gun violence eventually fails. Seemingly, the Second Amendment stops any attempt to control guns. Despite this, there have been commonsense approaches to reducing gun violence that have been very effective in some communities. How gun violence has been managed in these communities is reviewed in this podcast with JAMA author April M. Zeoli, PhD, MPH, from the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University, Lansing.

Great controversy exists regarding the safety of surgery when the attending surgeon allows someone else to perform parts of the operation. These practices are necessary components of surgical training, but how safe this is for patients remains unknown. In this podcast we discuss the risks and benefits associated with overlapping and concurrent surgery with a recognized expert in this topic, Michelle M. Mello, JD, PhD, a professor of law at Stanford University and the Department of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University School of Medicine, California.

COPD is common enough that it is responsible for 3% of all clinic visits in the United States. Clinicians will undoubtedly deal with this disease in their practice. How to diagnose and manage it is reviewed by Frank C. Sciurba, MD, a professor of medicine from the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Next-generation sequencing is a catchall term for new, high-throughput technologies that allow rapid sequencing of a full genome. It can be used to sequence a patient's DNA in diagnosing a genetic disorder or characterizing a cancer, but can also be used to sequence the genome of a pathogenic bacteria, virus, fungi, or parasites. In this JAMA clinical review podcast, we talk with authors Marta Gwinn, MD, MPH, and Gregory L. Armstrong, MD, from the CDC, about how next-generation sequencing of infectious pathogens is being implemented in clinical practice and in public health surveillance for infectious disease.

E-values are a new tool that enables investigators to estimate the likelihood that some unmeasured confounder might overcome seemingly positive results. They are very easy to calculate and any reader of the medical literature can do this calculation to get a sense for how likely it is that there is some unmeasured factor in an observational study that might negate otherwise seemingly positive findings. Read the article: Using the E-Value to Assess the Potential Effect of Unmeasured Confounding in Observational Studies E-Value Calculator

Saved by a Fitbit. Technology is developing at a pace far exceeding its application in medical care. An exception is in consumer devices, which as long as they do not hold themselves out as diagnostic tools, can apply as many technologies to wearable devices as companies want to put into them. In this episode we discuss how a clinician used a wearable device to diagnose his father's rapid heart rates consistent with dangerous cardiac arrhythmias. Read the article: Wearable Devices for Cardiac Rhythm Diagnosis and Management

Breast cancer screening is debated passionately among those who advocate for very aggressive screening and other experts who believe that screening can be harmful. The arguments for all sides of the debate are best understood by knowing the numbers of women who will benefit or be harmed by breast cancer screening. Both sides of the debate are explained in this podcast by Nancy Keating, MD, and Lydia Pace, MD, both from the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Very few people who think they are allergic to penicillin actually are. Yet, even if someone reports a remote and vague history of penicillin allergy, these very useful medications will not be given. This forces many patients to use antibiotics that may be too broad spectrum, not very effective, or expensive. Three major societies have come together to agree on an approach for assessing if penicillin allergy is really present when a patient reports an allergy to these medications. Erica S. Shenoy, MD, PhD, from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, author of a JAMA review on the topic, discusses this very important problem. Read the article: Evaluation and Management of Penicillin Allergy: A Review

When flying and they call "Is there a licensed medical professional on board," should physicians respond? If so, what should they do? Are they liable if things go wrong? We interview Christian Martin-Gill, MD, MPH, Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, who is an expert on in-flight emergencies and authored a JAMA review on the topic.