BACKGROUND Translating a question into a query using patient characteristics, type of intervention, control, and outcome (PICO) should help answer therapeutic questions in PubMed searches. The authors performed a randomized crossover trial to determine whether the PICO format was useful for quick searches of PubMed. METHODS Twenty-two residents and specialists working at the Radboud Universit...

INTRODUCTION Exercise is integral to health across the lifespan and important for people with chronic health conditions. A systematic review of exercise trials for chronic conditions reported suboptimal descriptions of the evaluated interventions and concluded that this hinders interpretation and replication. The aim of this project is to develop a standardised method for reporting essential ex...

OBJECTIVE To better understand the structure of the Patient Assessment of Chronic Illness Care (PACIC) instrument. More specifically to test all published validation models, using one single data set and appropriate statistical tools. DESIGN Validation study using data from cross-sectional survey. PARTICIPANTS A population-based sample of non-institutionalized adults with diabetes residing ...

Critical to the discovery, development and rational use of drugs and vaccines are the foundational principles and proper application of statistics. However, in too many cases, there has been misuse of statistics and/or overemphasis on statistical significance (p < 0.05), as though this criterion possessed truth-guaranteeing properties. To clarify confusion about the proper use of statistics in ...

Review Potentially eligible studies for full text review (n=333) Articles abstracted (n=192) Included studies (n=102) Studies added after peer review (n=3) Studies added: a. hand searching (n=5) b. Journal of Rural Health (n=19) Non-United States population = 6 Population <18 years old = 3 Not publication type criteria = 66 Not Healthcare outcomes, structure/process/harms = 80 Non-Rural Health ...

Background: Handwriting problems are one of the common problems among students in the early years of education. The current study aimed to determine further validation aspects of the Persian Handwriting Assessment Tool (PHAT) in primary school-aged children.Methods: The current methodological study was conducted on 452 healthy 8-10-year-old students in Tehran, Iran, selected via random cl...

Background Nowadays, health systems are generally acknowledged to be complex social systems. Consequently, scholars, academics, practitioners, and policy-makers are exploring how to adopt a complexity perspective in health policy and system research. While leadership and complexity has been studied extensively outside health, the implications of complexity theories for the study of leader...

I present some extensions of Bayesian methods to situations in which biases are of concern. First, a basic misclassification problem is illustrated using data from a study of sudden infant death syndrome. Bayesian analyses are then given. These analyses can be conducted directly, or by converting actual-data records to incomplete records and prior distributions to complete-data records, then ap...