Editorial - February 2021

Dear Members,

We truly hope this year’s first newsletter finds you all well as it coincides with the rampage of the new COVID-19 variants with heightened infectivity, placing London virtually under siege and keeping us all in the grips of firm lock-downs. Doing research is difficult for everyone with restricted access to labs and increased clinical tasks, with many physicians falling ill which places healthcare under more strain than usual. We see physicians of different backgrounds active on COVID-19 wards and on vaccination duty on top of- and outside of- their usual line of work. For this we are of course grateful as we need to stand together to get through this.

It is clear that we are all in need of good science to help us understand what we are facing and how to best deal with this pandemic, and without proper research this is difficult. This dire need also comes at a risk. A recent interview on the TCTMD website describes the storm of papers that continues being submitted for publication on COVID-19 related studies from cross-sectional and simulation-based studies to case series and cohort studies. Indeed, they report that more than 10,000 papers in the English and Chinese-language were published as of May 2020, of which 7,468 were peer reviewed. This aside a multitude of papers on preprint repositories. The interviewed editors of major journals recognised the need of the community for information but were simultaneously faced with the risk of bias of small studies. They are aware that the pressure of fast communication has a risk of less well thought through research being published. Each of them is trying to find a way through this. The paper by Pundi et al, published in JAMA Internal Medicine last October, tried to make this visible by reviewing COVID-19 Studies Registered on ClinicalTrials.gov. The paper by Raynaud et al, recently published in BMC Medical Research Methodology, has also tried to make this concern of what they call “the risk of expedited science” visible.  It also places publication of classical and at least equally important other clinically relevant research topics under pressure. Raynaud et al found that since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic the majority of research is composed of publications without original data, and they further state that their findings underscore the urgent need to strike a balance between the velocity and quality of research, and to cautiously consider medical information and clinical applicability in a pressing, pandemic context. This places more responsibility on the readers and we want to point towards the Oxford Center for Evidence Based Medicine. The OCEBM “levels of evidence” were first produced in 1998 for -Evidence-Based On Call- to make the process of finding appropriate evidence feasible and its results explicit. OCEBM Levels assists clinicians to conduct their own rapid appraisal and can be found here. We thought to share this with you to be even more critical than usual in interpreting results of COVID-19 related research, both published and shared during meetings.

We would also like to draw your attention to the paper of the month. This month the junior and senior commentary is written by Hanne Ehrlinder and Gregory Lip, and deals with the ELDERCARE-AF trial, in which the investigators shed light on very elderly AF patients with multimorbidity – an understudied yet growing patient group in the clinic.

As for meetings, the upcoming meetings and abstract submission deadlines that we would like to draw your attention to are:

1. ESC Congress 2021, the digital experience, will run from Friday, 27 to Monday, 30 August. Deadlines for submitting abstracts have changed to 1 April (not 14 February) and 8 June for late-breaking science (not mid-May).
2. The ISTH, a hybrid event in Philadelphia, will run from 17 to 21 July 2021. Regular abstract submission closes 2 February at 17:00 EST (U.S.), and late breaking science submission closes 2 June at 09:00 EST (U.S.).
3. Please be aware that FCVB 2021 has been postponed to 29 April - 1 May 2022 and will be held in Hungary, Budapest.

On behalf of the Working Group nucleus 2020-2022,

Heleen van Beusekom, Communication Coordinator and Tobias Geisler, secretary.