BACKGROUND Reference intervals (RIs) for serum IgG subclasses vary greatly among different geographical regions. The present study aimed to establish RIs for serum IgG subclasses in Chinese children, which is essential for interpretation of laboratory findings and making clinical decisions. METHODS This study was performed in accordance with guideline C28-A3, proposed by the International Fed...

The international Appraisal of Guidelines, Research and Evaluation (AGREE) research team developed a tool to assess the methodological quality of practice guidelines— the original was released in 2003 (AGREE),1 and the revised and updated version in 2009 (AGREE II).2 AGREE II has become a widely used standard for evaluating the methodological quality and transparency of practice guidelines inte...

BACKGROUND Outcome in patients treated with haemodialysis (HD) is influenced by the delivered dose of dialysis. The UK Renal Association (RA) publishes Clinical Practice Guidelines which include recommendations for dialysis dose. The urea reduction ratio (URR) is a widely used measure of dialysis dose. AIM To determine the extent to which patients received the recommended dose of HD in the UK...

Heel pain, whether plantar or posterior, is predominantly a mechanical pathology although an array of diverse pathologies including neurologic, arthritic, traumatic, neoplastic, infectious, or vascular etiologies must be considered. This clinical practice guideline (CPG) is a revision of the original 2001 document developed by the American College of Foot and Ankle Surgeons (ACFAS) heel pain co...

The National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) and its guideline classification system are significant contributions to the study of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) and their incorporation into routine clinical care. The NGC classification system is primarily designed to support guideline retrieval. We believe that a guideline classification system should also support identification of features...

OBJECTIVE To explore family physicians' perspectives on how best to provide evidence-based preventive clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) to physicians on the Internet. DESIGN Focus groups. SETTING A large, urban centre and a rural community hospital. PARTICIPANTS Thirty-four of more than 150 family physicians who subscribed to an e-mail discussion group. METHOD Qualitative survey of fo...

The objective of this study was to conduct the systematic evaluation of methodological quality of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) in Korea. The authors conducted a very comprehensive literature search to identify potential CPGs for evaluation. CPGs were selected which were consistent with a predetermined criteria. Four reviewers evaluated the quality of the CPGs using the Appraisal of Guide...

Evidence-based clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) help guide busy practitioners in clinical decision making. CPGs are evidence-based in that recommendations are based on available knowledge derived from published clinical trials. The challenges presented by the tasks of finding, assessing, interpreting, and assembling the information in these reports are herculean. Missing or imperfect evidenc...

Physicians have an ethical responsibility to their patients to offer the best available medical care. This responsibility conflicts with their role as gatekeepers of the limited health care resources available for all patients collectively. It is ethically untenable to expect doctors to face this trade-off during each patient encounter; the physician cannot be expected to compromise the wellbei...

Clinical practice guidelines are used to disseminate best practice to clinicians. Successful guidelines depend on literature that is both relevant to the questions posed and based on high quality research in accordance with evidence-based medicine. Meeting these standards requires extensive manual review. We describe a system that combines symbolic semantic processing with a statistical method ...