International Guideline Library update

Editor’s pick from the guidelines library update

As always we offer you many good, useful and interesting documents in the G-I-N Guidelines library update. I encourage all to browse through to find the documents of most relevance to you. I will draw your attention to three entries this time.

There is and has been a lot of controversy in many countries about PSA testing/screening for early detection of prostate cancer. American College of Physicians has published a review of guidelines about this topic: ‘ Screening for Prostate Cancer: A Guidance Statement From the Clinical Guidelines Committee of the American College of Physicians.’ The conclusion is clear: ‘ACP recommends that clinicians should not screen for prostate cancer using the prostate-specific antigen test in average-risk men under the age of 50 years, men over the age of 69 years, or men with a life expectancy of less than 10 to 15 years. Read more: http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1676183

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US (CDC) and its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices every year reviews the evidence and publish updates of the child immunization program in the US. International collaboration between CDC, the GRADE working group, the European Centre for Disease prevention and Control, the Robert Koch Institute in Germany and National Immunization Advisory Committees has also taken part to further develop the evidence based methodology for immunization guidance. These guidelines are treasures for all who need to update national immunization programs: Read more: www.guideline.gov/content.aspx?id=39538

The Belgian Healthcare Knowledge Center has published new guidelines for Ankle Sprains, https://kce.fgov.be/publication/report/ankle-sprains-diagnosis-and-therapy. This is a very interesting document, both regarding its practical content for a common painful health condition, but also for the methodological discussions regarding developing guidelines when there is lack of sound evidence, like this quote from the introduction indicates: ‘That same tension between scientific proof (or the lack of it) and clinical expertise and experience of course came to the fore in the discussions with clinicians and experts during the course of the study. It brought us to formulate a number of additional recommendations, based on expert consensus.’

Frode Forland
F.Forland@kit.nl

Standards for Clinical Practice Guidelines

Dear Friends:

I was recently invited to write an expert commentary for the National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) and National Quality Measures Clearinghouse (NQMC) Web sites regarding recent guideline standards developed by the Guidelines International Network and the Institute of Medicine. I tried to highlight the similarities between the standards, issues related to their implementation, and addressed some of the criticism. This paper was published in April 2013 (1) and would be happy to hear your thoughts, that can be shared on the NGC’s website, or you can email them to me.

With warm regards,

Amir Qaseem, MD, PhD, Chair of the Guidelines International Network (G-I-N)
Director, Clinical Policy, American College of Physicians
aqaseem@acponline.org
+1 215 3512570

www.guidelines.gov/expert/expert-commentary.aspx?id=43913