Cochrane Sweden celebrates three years, Cochrane Covid-19 reviews and resources and much more.
Cochrane Sweden's Birthday!
Cochrane Sweden was launched on the 16th of May 2017 and just turned three years old! Today, three years later, the center has established itself in Sweden's healthcare system and is expanding the collaborations with Universities and Högskolor within Sweden.
We will continue to further establish Evidence-based Medicine and the Cochrane methodology in Sweden - to have more informed health and treatment-decisions and consequently better health.
Summary of Covid-19 resources from Cochane
During the last month Cochrane has worked intensively to supply policymakers, researchers, treatment providers and the public with trusted evidence to support decision making related to Covid-19. Here is a summary of some relevant links and topics. You can follow Cochrane Covid-19 News for regular updates.
Cochrane Special Collection: Diagnosing skin cancer
May is Skin Cancer Awareness Month. To contribute to the awareness - Cochrane Skin Group has created a Special Collection regarding diagnosing skin cancer.
This collection brings together a series of screening and diagnostic test accuracy systematic reviews for diagnosing skin cancer, which aim to identify the most accurate approaches to diagnosis, and so provide the best evidence on which clinical and policy-related decisions can be based.
The aim of any testing for skin cancer is to detect all possibly malignant cases using high sensitivity techniques, without having too many false positives, which lead to unnecessary referrals and treatment. There is a trade-off between sensitivity and specificity, as techniques with high sensitivity lead to lower specificity (a higher number of false positives). With increasing rates of skin cancer worldwide, and a trend to adopt dermoscopy, and other high-resolution image analysis in primary care, anxiety around missing identification of early malignant lesions needs to be balanced against the risk of unnecessary treatment and referrals to specialists.
Article in JAMA about harms of screening for skin cancer
Last month, Rita Rubin reported in JAMA on potential harms of screening for skin cancer (melanoma). The article referred to a Cochrane Review on melanoma screening by Minna Johansson, Director of Cochrane Sustainable Healthcare, which found that screening for melanoma did not fulfill the internationally acknowledged criteria for the implementation of screening interventions.
A recent Australian study has also estimated that more than half of melanoma cases could have been overdiagnosed, which would indicate that the skin cancers never would have caused any harm if they had been left undetected and untreated.
You can read the JAMA article here or access the Cochrane Review here.
Cochrane's Early Career Professionals Group online meetup about Research Collaborations
Cochrane's new Early Career Professionals Group has organized an online meetup the 17th of June. The topic for this meeting will be Research Collaborations! Cochrane Sweden will present at this meetup, together with several of our Cochane International Mobility participants.
If you are interested in this topic you can find more information about this event as well as upcoming activities here.
Cochranes Sweden's International Mobility programme has gone virtual
At the moment Cochrane Sweden have six students and researchers enrolled in the Cochrane International Mobility programme. Today we introduce Greta, who is currently doing her mobility virtually and is preparing a systematic review about minimizing blood loss in very preterm infants.
Article in Tidningen Curie about Cochrane Sweden
Last month Cochrane Sweden was interviewed by Tidningen Curie, published by Vetenskapsrådet, about the Swedish Cochrane Center, what Cochrane aims to achieve and a fair deal about Cochrane's response to Covid-19.
Introduction to Cochrane Methodology 23 - 27 November in Lund. This is our most popular course and usually books up far in advance. The one week course is mainly aimed at PhD-students but is open for everyone to join. The course is based on campus but can be conducted online if necessary. You can find more information about the course here.
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses in animal research 2 - 3 December in Stockholm. Not strictly speaking a Cochrane-course, but introduces the very relevant topic of conducting systematic reviews in animal research. You can find more information about the course here.
Suggestions for future courses and workshops
Feel free to contact us if you have suggestions for specific Cochrane workshops or courses.
At Cochrane Sweden, we offer a number of courses and workshops for people interested in learning to conduct, edit and read systematic reviews.
Cochrane Sweden regularly offer courses all over Sweden and Europe. We are always looking for new topics and locations for the next course. Any suggestions for future locations or specific workshops or courses would be welcome. Please contact us by email if you have an idea or suggestion for a future course/workshop for 2020 or 2021.
Join Cochrane Sweden
Would you like to be a part of the Cochrane community? We have over 68,000 supporters from around the world and 11,000 members. There a number of ways that you can contribute. You can find out more from our Join Cochrane page on how you can be a part of Cochrane.
Watch this 3-minute video to learn more about Cochrane Sweden and what we do.
At Cochrane Sweden, we also regularly host and train people who would like to work with Cochrane through the Cochrane International Mobility Programme. Some of the people participating on this programme have kindly shared their stories, which can be read on the Join Cochrane webpage.
May is Skin Cancer Awareness Month. To contribute to the awareness - Cochrane Skin Group has created a Special Collection regarding diagnosing skin cancer.
