Optimal differentiated thyroid cancer management in the elderly.

The incidence of differentiated thyroid cancer is increasing worldwide across all age groups. While most patients with differentiated thyroid cancer have a good prognosis, aggressive disease is more common in the elderly and disease-specific mortality is higher. Treatment options for differentiated thyroid cancer include surgery, levothyroxine, radioactive iodine, external beam radiotherapy and kinase inhibitors.

Lower treatment targets for gestational diabetes: is lower really better?

Proposed lower diagnostic thresholds and lower treatment targets for gestational diabetes have been controversial internationally. Intervention trials for the recently revised lower Australian treatment targets are currently lacking. While there may be benefits, lowering treatment targets may cause a number of harms including increased risk of hypoglycaemia in pregnant women, greater medicolegal risk for health practitioners, and heavier economic costs for the health system.

Safer hours for doctors and improved safety for patients.

An increasing weight of evidence is demonstrating that sleep deprivation and circadian rhythm disruption in doctors are associated with human error and harm to both patients and doctors. The increasing junior doctor workforce entering the hospital system in Australia provides a rare opportunity for workplace and roster reforms. There are cultural, educational and industrial challenges to reforming working hours.

Emerging inequality and potential unconstitutionality - the case for reform of the intern priority system.

Internship selection is becoming more competitive due to substantial increases in numbers of medical graduates. Australian states operate a "priority system" for medical internship selection which discriminates against Australian interstate applicants. This discrimination arguably infringes section 117 of the Australian Constitution, which seeks to ensure that all citizens are treated equally and promotes national unity.

Chronic urticaria following acute hepatitis A.

Urticaria has a documented association with the prodromal phases of hepatitis A, B and, although still contentious, likely hepatitis C. Despite the documented association there are few actual reported cases of urticaria occurring with hepatitis A infection and in all of the cases reported so far the urticaria preceded the diagnosis of hepatitis A and was acute rather than chronic. We describe a case of urticaria occurring following acute infection with hepatitis A, which persisted beyond 6 weeks and therefore was by definition chronic.

Conflict of interest guidelines for clinical guidelines.

• Clinical guidelines are being increasingly produced to improve quality of care, but are vulnerable to bias. • Only 15% of guidelines on the National Health and Medical Research Council portal from the most prolific developers have published conflict of interest statements, and fewer detail the processes used to manage conflicts. • Comprehensive disclosure of conflicts is needed to safeguard the integrity of clinical guidelines and the medical profession.