July

BCMA Annual Business Meeting and General Assembly
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Vancouver Convention Centre

2011/2012 BCMA elected officers
Dr Nasir Jetha, President
Dr Ian Gillespie, Past President
Dr Shelley Ross, President-Elect
Dr William Cunningham, 
Chair, General Assembly
Dr Mark Corbett, 
Honorary Secretary Treasurer

Award recipients

BACHOP SILVER MEDAL IN GENERAL MEDICAL PRACTICE
Dr Shoshauna Guilfoyle

Insurance is peace of mind; protection for you, your family, and your staff members from economic hardship caus­­ed by unforeseen loss. The BCMA is pleased to offer a wide range of insurance products and services to its valued members. From life, disability, health, dental, travel, critical illness, office overhead, accidental death and dismemberment, to general insurance for home, office and auto, the BCMA is committed to ensuring these preferentially priced insurance solutions work for you. 

With new information available, authors of a Cochrane Systematic Review have revised their conclusions about the relative effectiveness of two treatments used to help women be­come pregnant. They now conclude that giving women gonadotrophin-releasing hormone (GnRH) antagonists leads to similar live-birth rates compared with GnRH agonists. Previously they had concluded that women who used antagonists tended to have lower birth rates than those using agonists. 

Giving patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease newly available oral phosphodiesterase 4 (PDE4) inhibitors, roflumilast or cilomilast, improves lung function and reduces the likelihood of a flare-up, but does not increase general quality of life. 

Roflumilast and cilomilast are members of a new class of medicines, and trials have now evaluated their safety and performance. A team of researchers looked at data from nine trials of roflumilast and 14 trials of cilomilast involving over 1000 patients. 

BC Children’s Hospital is launching a new clinical research program that promises to change the medical paradigm for diagnosing and treating intellectual disability in children. 

The program, called “Treatable Intellectual Disability Endeavour in BC (TIDE-BC),” features a diagnostic protocol of specific lab tests to identify all children in BC who have a treatable form of intellectual disability that’s caused by a class of rare metabolic diseases.