The best evidence topic report (BET) by Hogg and Mahu¹ raises a number of concerns, both with the article itself and the BETs process as a whole. The relative efficacy of adrenaline and vasopressin in the management of cardiac arrest is an important subject of relevance to all who work in emergency medicine. For this BET to only include those papers directly comparing vasopressin and adrenaline is to dismiss a large amount of research published in this area. A very brief search on Medline reveals a large number of articles looking at this subject, including two recently published reviews comparing adrenaline and vasopressin,^2,3 not mentioned by the authors. Surely a topic such as this should be subject to a formal literature review and meta-analysis, not the “shortcut review” method advocated by the BETs methodology.

One of the stated aims of the BET …