Risk treatment thresholds for initiating cardiovascular disease pharmacotherapy: Synthesis of international evidence to support guideline recommendations.

Background: A new Australian guideline for cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk assessment and management was published in 2023, including new risk treatment thresholds.

Objective: This article summarises the published peer-reviewed global evidence that informed guideline recommendations on risk treatment thresholds for initiating blood pressure- and lipid-lowering therapy for CVD primary prevention.

Discussion: Evidence from 13 meta-analyses, randomised controlled trials and modelling studies involving more than 515,700 patients showed that preventive pharmacotherapy reduced the number of CVD events at all risk levels.

Pain and its interference with daily living in relation to cancer: a comparative population-based study of 16,053 cancer survivors and 106,345 people without cancer.

Background: Pain is a common, debilitating, and feared symptom, including among cancer survivors. However, large-scale population-based evidence on pain and its impact in cancer survivors is limited. We quantified the prevalence of pain in community-dwelling people with and without cancer, and its relation to physical functioning, psychological distress, and quality of life (QoL).

Evidence supporting the choice of a new cardiovascular risk equation for Australia.

This article reviews the risk equations recommended for use in international cardiovascular disease (CVD) primary prevention guidelines and assesses their suitability for use in Australia against a set of a priori defined selection criteria. The review and assessment were commissioned by the National Heart Foundation of Australia on behalf of the Australian Chronic Disease Prevention Alliance to inform recommendations on CVD risk estimation as part of the 2023 update of the Australian CVD risk assessment and management guidelines. Selected international risk equations were assessed against eight selection criteria: development using contemporary data; inclusion of established cardiovascular risk factors; inclusion of ethnicity and deprivation measures; prediction of a broad selection of fatal and non-fatal CVD outcomes; population representativeness; model performance; external validation in an Australian dataset; and the ability to be recalibrated or modified.

Electronic cigarettes and health outcomes: umbrella and systematic review of the global evidence.

Objective: To review and synthesise the global evidence regarding the health effects of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes, vapes).

Study Design: Umbrella review (based on major independent reviews, including the 2018 United States National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM] report) and top-up systematic review of published, peer-reviewed studies in humans examining the relationship of e-cigarette use to health outcomes published since the NASEM report.

Data Sources: Umbrella review: eight major independent reviews published 2017-2021.