Rising interest in CLIPPERS

One way of measuring how interested the scientific community is in CLIPPERS is to look at the number of CLIPPERS papers which have been published in medical journals. To get a paper describing a study published, it has to be deemed appropriate for the readership of the journal (i.e. you don't usually see papers about liver disease in neurology journals), to show evidence of novelty or a contribution to knowledge, and to demonstrate that the work has been carried out to commonly acknowledged scientific standards. 

A related measure for each paper, which many people get obsessed by, is how many times that paper was referred to by other papers - the number of citations. A paper which generates a lot of interest will generally be referred to (cited) by many other papers in the future. So although it is early days, what can we deduce about CLIPPERS by looking at the number of papers published each year, and the number of citations of these papers.

Number of papers published per year

The first graph shows the number of papers published about CLIPPERS in each of the last four years. The numbers are relatively small, but they are rising. A list of most of these papers can be found here.

Number of CLIPPERS citations per year

The second graph shows the number of times the papers have been referred to (cited). Of course, often the later CLIPPERS papers are citing the earlier ones, but occasionally other papers in neurology refer to CLIPPERS too. The single most cited paper is the original one from Prof. Pittock at the Mayo Clinic. Coincidentally, I managed to speak with Prof. Pittock recently and hope to report some outcomes from that conversation quite soon. Watch this space.

Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.

Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Sides

Sometimes it's easy to get into a routine with treatment, especially when it is pill-popping. Until something "interesting" (read "bad") happens I am not seeing the docs very often at all. To save me getting too complacent though, there are always treatment-related side-effects to worry about. While taking Azathioprine these have been very mild, at least the overt ones. In fact, the only thing I can report is occasional bouts of a metallic taste, and that seems quite common over a range of drugs. It is the covert side-effects which are potentially the more worrying which is why regular blood tests are the order of the day. 

I recently had one of those worrying phone messages from the medical centre which have zero information content and much larger worrying content "Please call the centre as soon as possible.". This was 2 days after I had been in for blood tests. So something obviously amiss, but what? Well to cut a long story short, one of my liver scores came back as "borderline" which triggered a "make an appointment to see your doctor" call. However this was done without reference to my history so when I phoned up and it got referred back to my regular doctor, he said it was OK. So in the land of CLIPPERS, "borderline" equals "fine" on this occasion ...

This, and some recent email correspondence with other CLIPPERS sufferers, made me think about side-effects a bit more, as I think they are often under-reported. So I started a new Forum topic if anyone is interested in relating their experience on medication.

Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.


Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.