The June volume nestles the CMJ in a soft and comfortable blanket of family medicine, just as a family wraps its newborn baby. We wished to illustrate with this cover page the importance of family medicine in providing health and care to the widest community. Family medicine is the topic to which CMJ returns very often and with great respect. This time we present the overview of the role of primary health care in ensuring access to medicines and two research articles, one on the training of family physicians in recognizing and managing depression and evaluating suicide risk and the other on the accuracy of their assessment of chest pain in patients treated for chronic heart disease.
Health care systems in countries undergoing socio-economic transition in Europe are another important topic within the CMJ’s scope. In this issue we explore new developments in Romania, the new member of the European Union, such as their experience in changing the patient classification systems for hospital reimbursement and the analysis of ear-nose-throat services in Romanian hospitals as a tool for informed management in health services.
Forensic DNA analysis is a regular theme issue in CMJ, but we receive submissions from this research field outside the two-year interval between the meetings of the International Society for Applied Biological Sciences. This time we present the genetic analysis of the 17 Y-chromosome short tandem repeat haplotypes in a population sample from Eastern Croatia, as an important contribution to the genetic epidemiology of the region.
In the CMJ’s clinical research section there are also several papers from small or developing countries. The topics range from the 10-year follow up of patients with war-related post-traumatic stress in Croatia, study of enteral loading doses of phenobarbital needed to reach its therapeutic serum levels in neonates from Turkey, to a prospective study of mother-to-infant transmission of hepatitis C virus in pregnant women in Egypt. A study from China compares radiotherapy treatment of para-aortic lymph node metastasis of cervical cancer with intensity-modulated radiation versus para-aortic field radiotherapy.
Two important articles pertain to scientific publishing in medicine. One is the editorial published simultaneously in several medical journals supporting comparative effectiveness research for improving decision-making about existing and new approaches to health care. To reach this goal, a group of editors and researchers calls for the adoption of stringent methods, and high standards of ethics, scientific rigor, and reporting. To improve the publishing standards, the research group from the Rijeka School of Medicine in Croatia constructed and validated a questionnaire of attitudes towards plagiarism – such an instrument may help us understand why plagiarism occurs in science and how to prevent it. Good topics for the summer – let’s hope it will be full of sunshine!