Pleural effusion: An uncommon manifestation of nitrofurantoin-induced pulmonary injury.

Nitrofurantoin has been documented as a cause of acute, sub-acute, and chronic pulmonary injury. This is a case of an 82 year-old female who presented with multiple episodes of respiratory symptoms due to recurrent pleural effusions after beginning nitrofurantoin therapy for urinary tract infection prophylaxis. Due to the rarity of pleural effusion as an adverse reaction to nitrofurantoin, the diagnosis was overlooked at first.

Fixed vs random effects meta-analysis in rare event studies: the rosiglitazone link with myocardial infarction and cardiac death.

Meta-analyses can be powerful tools to combine the results of randomized clinical trials and observational studies to make consensus inferences about a medical issue. It will be demonstrated that a common practice of testing for homogeneity of effect size, and acting upon the inference to decide between fixed vs random effects, can lead to potentially misleading results. A by-product of this paper is a new ratio estimator approach to random effects meta-analysis of a large set of studies with low event rates.