Hearts and minds and meta-analyses

Big issues dominate this week's BMJ—heart disease, cancer, and the state of our children's health. Two large prospective studies seem to scotch the idea of an association between ischaemic heart disease and infection with Chlamydia pneumoniae.Nick Wald's group studied a large cohort of healthy professional men and found no material association between ischaemic heart disease and C pneumoniae infection (p 204). John Danesh's group studied a similarly large group and also performed a meta-analysis of 14 other prospective studies (including that by Wald et al) and came up with …