BACKGROUND Non-adherence to prescribed medications represents an obstacle toward achieving treatment goals. This problem is more pronounced in patients with chronic illness. OBJECTIVE To identify the extent of adherence in Lebanese outpatients with chronic diseases, and to suggest possible predictors of non-adherence in this population. The secondary objective was to assess if medication adhe...

Appropriate statistical analyses are an integral part of surgical research. The purpose of this work is to assist surgeons and clinicians with the interpretation of statistics by providing a general understanding of the basic concepts that lead to choosing an appropriate statistical test for common study designs. It is extremely important to understand the nature of the data before embarking on...

Dear Editor, After perusing the report by Vardavas and Kafatos, on smoking policy and prevalence in Greece, we thought that would be of interest to demonstrate the findings of our study concerning the urban-rural differences in smoking prevalence. The study was conducted during the recent election day (15 October 2006) in the municipality of Salamis and Nemea. The first represent an urban area ...

Social environment risk factors present in schools and communities have not been thoroughly investigated. This study cross-sectionally examined the social environments of schools and communities, and their influence on adolescent alcohol and drug use. Survey responses of eighth grade students (N = 2309), a random half of their parents (n = 943), community leaders (n = 118), school principals (n...

OBJECTIVE Although there is clear evidence that low levels of positive future thinking (anticipation of positive experiences in the future) and hopelessness are associated with suicide risk, the relationship between the content of positive future thinking and suicidal behavior has yet to be investigated. This is the first study to determine whether the positive future thinking-suicide attempt r...

Background The purpose of this study was to develop a nomogram to predict cancer-specific survival (CSS) in pancreatic cancer (PC). Patients and methods We used the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database to analyze 53,028 patients diagnosed with PC from 2004 to 2014 and randomly divided them into the training (n=26,583) cohort and validation (n=26,445) cohort. Univariate ...

The objective of this study was to determine if race/ethnicity predicts motivation to quit smoking and preferences for cessation services among smokers serviced by a primarily psychiatric Veterans Affairs hospital. A self-administered survey was given to a convenience sample of smokers (n=146) at the Battle Creek Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Univariate, bivariate and multivariate regression...

BACKGROUND The object of this study was to assess the efficay and maximum duration of effect of the pleural tent in reducing the incidence of air leak after upper lobectomy. METHODS Two hundred patients who underwent upper lobectomy were prospectively randomized into two groups: 100 patients who underwent an upper lobectomy and a pleural tent procedure (group 1; tented patients) and 100 patie...

OBJECTIVES Pathological complete response has shown a better prognosis for patients with locally advanced rectal cancer after preoperative chemoradiotherapy. However, correlations between post-chemoradiotherapy clinical factors and pathologic complete response are not well confirmed. The aim of the current study was to identify post-chemoradiotherapy clinical factors that could serve as indicat...