by Jay Luxenberg, MD

People use their tablet for a variety of purposes. I find my iPad a very useful supplement for the memory I no longer have. I’d like to base my practice on the best of the large randomized trials that are out there. I think there must have been a time when my brain sufficed to keep the acronyms straight – remembering them all from AASK (intensive blood-pressure control in hypertensive chronic kidney disease, published in NEJM 2010) to WOSCOPS (prevention of coronary heart disease with pravastatin in men with hypercholesterolemia, also in NEJM, 1995). As the number of trials and the crazy acronyms have proliferated, my cortex has not been able to keep up with the challenge. Thus the role of an iPad app called MyStudies. It presents the data on 228 complete studies (and is frequently updated). It works on a subscription model, with the app free and the annual subscription currently $10.

It uses tags to let you find studies fast without remembering the acronym – e.g. tap on “chelation” and the TACT study published in JAMA this year shows up. Its interface is simply terrific, with every effort made to simplify the presentation of design and data to let you get the important information quickly. Every study has a table with absolute risk reduction, relative risk reduction and number needed to treat for each category of outcome. Yes, you can sit down and contemplate that – they calculate these parameters if not originally reported in the paper, and present them so they are the first thing you see for each study. The second page has information on study design, baseline demographics and baseline labs. The third page is a structured abstract of the original paper. You can print the abstract, e-mail the information or send it to your reference software. You can click and go to PubMed, where you may have access to the full paper. Run don’t walk to their web site: http://www.mystudies.org/ and read more about it. You can get access for a subset of the studies on their web site or on the free iPad app as a free trial. To try the full set of studies a one week subscription is only $1, and a 3 month subscription is $5 (but best price is the $10 for a full year). I suspect you will consider a subscription a very worthwhile investment. No Android version is evident from their web page, so for the time being this is iPad only.