We need to talk about TED

Couldn't have said it better myself: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted.  Thanks to Roberta Buiani for posting this on her Facebook page.

Paper Published: Carotid Bifurcation Geometry Is an Independent Predictor of Early Wall Thickening at the Carotid Bulb

This paper, just published online by Stroke, is the culmination of nearly a decade's worth of effort (e.g., see here, here, here, and here) trying to answer a deceptively simple question: can carotid bifurcation geometry be considered an additional risk factor for atherosclerosis.

As it turns out, the answer is "yes, but".  "Yes", because we did tease out a significant and independent association between early wall thickening and bifurcation flare & curvature geometric parameters; "but", because the association was relatively weak.

An equally interesting aspect of the study was the care we had to take to exclude secondary effects of thickening on geometry.  Had we not done so -- and as we showed -- the associations would have been even weaker or, worse, significantly stronger but inverse to what they should have been.