Month: November 2014

Introduction to the Assertion-Evidence Slide Design

by Nadia I. Awad, posted in EM PharmD Blog
In recent months of giving presentations to both future and seasoned pharmacy practitioners, I have been able to garner a new category of feedback from audience members that was never the case previously. It has been quite interesting to gain a new focus of feedback for my presentations, but I think it speaks volumes to how far we have come and how far we need to go when it comes to the provision of medical education.
It all has to do with my slides. To be more specific, it relates to the aesthetic design of my slides. The new general consensus from members of the audience has been along the lines of the following:
One individual even followed up that comment with a remark highlighting the fact that because I am a millennial, it made that much more sense that my slides consisted mostly of pictures and short phrases as opposed to the traditional bullet-long list filled with words, words, and more words. Hmm…

Here’s the thing: Slide templates (as we know them) set us up for failure. Yes, for both our audience members as learners and us as presenters.
We all know what slide templates within PowerPoint have to offer us. I challenge you to open up any master template on PowerPoint to find anything other than a variation of the slide template below:
This is what most of us, millennial or not, have all been traditionally accustomed to since the very existence of PowerPoint. Some will (gasp!) include a graphic squeezed onto the slide right next to the bullet list to further highlight the information being presented. Others will go on to even use the template as the script for the entire presentation, leading members of the audience to focus on the content on the slides rather than the words being spoken by the speaker. Worse, the speaker may lose the attention of the audience altogether.
But does this bread-and-butter template have to be the default in the first place? And more importantly, is this aiding the learning of members of the audience?
Believe it or not, there is a science behind slide design, and a group of educators and research engineers from Penn State University has been publishing their findings on this very topic. Their extensive research in multimedia learning and cognitive psychology has led them to develop an innovative form of slide structure known as assertion-evidence slides. This form of slide design incorporates a two-pronged approach, as illustrated below:
  1. Headline: Contains sentence that highlights the main assertion of the slide; and 
  2. Body: Visual graphic of the evidence that further elucidates the assertion statement of the slide (1).
In many ways, using this approach to design slides not only allows for the speaker to streamline and focus presentation of key concepts aimed to enhance the learning of the audience member through the elimination of disjointed concepts that otherwise may be incorporated through the use of a bulleted list of items, but it also allows the learner to synthesize connections between the assertion statement and the visual graphic (2, 3). To ensure that your audience has not missed any of the finer points of your presentation with information that may not be directly found within the slides, you may want to create a supplemental handout with references and such.
There have been relatively few studies published on the topic of learner assessment associated with assertion-evidence slide design (4, 5) but the findings of those that have been thus far have demonstrated superior long-term retention of the content of such presentations in contrast to traditional slide templates.
Now, granted, much more time, thought, and creative effort is required to be dedicated in designing such slides. (Who knew less is more? But I can tell you from firsthand experience that this indeed is very true.) However, in the long run, we are doing our learners a favor by portraying the information being presented in such a manner that facilitates their learning needs. 
At the end of the day, members of the audience should not forget that slides exist to serve as the backdrop to illustrate the story that the speaker is telling as part of the presentation. 
References:
  1. Rethinking Presentation Slides: The Assertion-Evidence Structure. Available at: http://writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html. Accessed November 18, 2014.
  2. Garner J, Alley M. PowerPoint in the psychology classroom: lessons from multimedia research. Psychology Learning & Teaching 2011; 10 (2):95-106.
  3. Garner J, Alley M, Gaudelli A et al. Common use of PowerPoint versus  assertion-evidence structure: A cognitive psychology perspective. Technical Communication 2009; 56 (4):331-345.
  4. Garner J, Alley M. How the design of presentation slides affects audience comprehension: A case for the assertion-evidence approach. International Journal of Engineering Education 2013; 29(6):1564-1579.
  5. Root Kustritz MV. Effect of differing PowerPoint slide design on multiple-choice test scores for assessment of knowledge and retention in a theriogenology course. J Vet Med Educ 2014; 41(3):311-317.

Tiny Tylenol Tidbit: The Loading Dose

by empharmd, posted in EM PharmD Blog
I work at an institution with a Children’s Hospital attached to it, which means that we encounter a fair amount of pediatric patients in the emergency department (ED). One of the most common complaints of children presenting to the ED is fever.

Acetaminophen is a routinely administered medication in this population. I recently had the opportunity to review a policy of standing orders for triage nurses in our ED that may be carried out before a provider sees the patient. One such order included administration of a loading dose of acetaminophen (30 mg/kg orally or 45 mg/kg per rectum) for children presenting to the ED with a fever.

Historically, it has been theorized that acetaminophen loading doses may be administered in order to achieve higher serum levels of drug and thus a more rapid pharmacodynamic effect. As you might expect, pharmacokinetic data from pediatric populations demonstrate that a 20-30 mg/kg oral dose of acetaminophen results in approximately a 2-fold higher serum concentration than a single 10-15 mg/kg dose.1-3 But is there evidence to correlate higher serum concentrations with better antipyresis?

The first of these studies was published by Treluyer and colleagues.4Subjects in this study (n = 121) were outpatient children ranging from 4 months to 9 years of age, and had to have an initial rectal temperature of 39° C to 40.5° C. They were randomized to receive a single dose of acetaminophen either 30 mg/kg or 15 mg/kg, and the primary outcome was time to rectal temperature below 38.5° C. Other outcomes included maximum temperature decrease, time to maximum temperature decrease, and number of patients requiring “rescue” temperature-altering treatment (a tepid water bath or a repeat dose of 15 mg/kg acetaminophen). Although the authors were able to find a statistically significant difference in the primary outcome of time to temperature less than 38.5° C, this difference was only 19 minutes, and the clinical significance is questionable. Additionally, the maximum temperature decrease was found to be statistically significant but only about 0.5° C.

Treluyer and colleagues’ results have not been replicated. Scolnik et al. compared standard and high dose rectal acetaminophen (15 mg/kg and 30 mg/kg) and the standard 15 mg/kg oral dose in 70 febrile children.5They found no difference in temperature change between groups. These findings were replicated in an evaluation by Nabulsi and colleagues.6 This study compared antipyretic effectiveness of two rectal acetaminophen doses (15 mg/kg and 35 mg/kg) and the standard oral dose of 15 mg/kg. Among the 51 febrile children randomized in this study, there were no significant differences in time to maximum antipyresis, time to fever reduction by at least 1° C, or mean hourly temperature for 6 hours after study drug administration.

Some unpublished data is available that confirms the lack of a significant difference in terms of antipyretic efficacy between the standard (15 mg/kg) and 20-30 mg/kg dosing regimens. Temple and colleagues summarize this unpublished data in a review, where they found a mean change in temperature at 4 hours was 1.5° C with a 10-15 mg/kg dose, and 1.9° C with a 20-30 mg/kg dose.7

The American Academy of Pediatrics has a guideline statement addressing the care of the febrile child.8 They specifically recommend against the routine administration of acetaminophen loading doses, citing a lack of consistent evidence and mounting concern for harm.

Wait a second, harm? What harm could come from a single dose of acetaminophen? The toxic threshold for most patients is 150 mg/kg, surely a dose of 30 mg/kg orally or 45 mg/kg rectally can’t cause a problem.

The concern that the American Academy of Pediatrics cites in their hesitancy to recommend loading doses of acetaminophen is related to hepatotoxicity with supratherapeutic dosing.4 In fact, many agree that the total dose of acetaminophen in children should not exceed 75 mg/kg/day because of the risk of hepatic injury.9 If a child received any acetaminophen at home prior to coming to the hospital, then starts receiving doses of 30 mg/kg at a time in the ED, the 75 mg/kg/day threshold may easily be exceeded.

So what to do about the loading dose? If a higher dose isn’t any better than the traditional dose in terms of fever reduction, what are you left with? Many pediatric providers are hesitant to routinely recommend acetaminophen for reasons other than making the patient comfortable in the setting of a febrile illness. Furthermore, when thinking about the (1) apparent lack of benefit of high-dose over conventional dosing and (2) the potential risk of hepatotoxicity with increasing/cumulative doses then the idea of the loading dose becomes much less attractive.

If you’ve decided that your febrile pediatric patient does indeed require a dose of acetaminophen to make them more comfortable, I’d stick to the recommended 15 mg/kg orally and leave the loading doses for vancomycin.

Meghan E. Groth, Pharm.D., BCPS (@EMPharmGirl)
Emergency Medicine Clinician, Fletcher Allen Health Care

Reviewed by: Craig Cocchio, Pharm.D., BCPS and Nadia Awad, Pharm.D., BCPS

References:
  1. McNeil Protocol 1-224 Issued September 1981. A double-blind study of the comparative antipyretic effectiveness and safety of a single 10 mg/kg, 20 mg/kg, or 30 mg/kg dose of acetaminophen. Study terminated; no report but data listings [Meta-Analysis Code P81224].
  2. McNeil Protocol 2-227 Issued October 1982. A double-blind study of the comparative antipyretic effectiveness and safety of a single 15 mg/kg, 30 mg/kg, or 40 mg/kg dose of acetaminophen. Study terminated; no report but data listings [Meta-Analysis Code P82227].
  3. Gelotte CK. Pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics modeling of acetaminophen in febrile children: evaluation of three products. Protocol 93-308. Report #003221. McNeil Consumer Products Company 1994 [Meta-Analysis Code P93308].
  4. Treluyer JM, Tonnelier S, d’Athis P, et al. Antipyretic efficacy of an initial 30 mg/kg loading dose of acetaminophen versus a 15 mg/kg maintenance dose. Pediatrics 2001; 108:e73.
  5. Scolnik D, Kozer E, Jacobson S, et al. Comparison of oral versus normal and high-dose rectal acetaminophen in the treatment of febrile children. Pediatrics 2002; 110:553-6.
  6. Nabulsi M, Tamim H, Sabra R, et al. Equal antipyretic effectiveness of oral and rectal acetaminophen: a randomized controlled trial. BMC Pediatr 2005; 5:35.
  7. Temple AR, Temple BR, and Kuffner EK. Dosing and antipyretic efficacy of oral acetaminophen in children. Clin Ther 2013; 35:1361-75.
  8. Sullivan JE, Farrar HC, et al. Fever and antipyretic use in children. Pediatrics 2011; 127:580-7.
  9. Kozer E, Greenberg R, Zimmerman DR, et al. Repeated supratherapeutic doses of paracetamol in children-a literature review and suggested clinical approach. Acta Pediatrica 2006; 95:1165-71.