The Audit Commission in the UK recommends that patient information leaflets (PILs) should be audited by health professionals using a formal readability test. However, no such study on antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) has been identified in a Medline search. The aim of this study was to audit the readability of PILs prepared for marketed proprietary AEDs in the UK. Twelve PILs were compared with six a...

When you are assessing the quality of the evidence, it’s not how the data are analyzed that’s important. Far more important is how the data are collected. Don’t agonize over whether the researchers should have used a non-parametric test or whether a random effects meta-analysis is appropriate (just to cite two obscure examples). These are important issues and they generate a lot of debate. But ...

BACKGROUND There are inconsistent reports about multiple sclerosis (MS) risk among migrants from low to high MS risk geographical regions. This study assessed the overall MS incidence and evaluated seasonality in birth and subsequent MS risk later in the life in second generation of migrants born and lived in Kuwait. METHODS We assessed the overall and gender-specific MS risk in second genera...

Two types of global testing procedures for item fit to the Rasch model were evaluated using simulation studies. The first type incorporates three tests based on first-order statistics: van den Wollenberg's Q(1) test, Glas's R(1) test, and Andersen's LR test. The second type incorporates three tests based on second-order statistics: van den Wollenberg's Q(2) test, Glas's R(2) test, and a non-par...

BACKGROUND To establish whether a previously validated scoring system (Habib) for the prediction of risk or likelihood of posterior capsule rupture during phacoemulsification surgery could be used to: 1. Predict the difficulty of a phacoemulsification case, and 2. Select appropriate phacoemulsification cases for trainees. METHODS The study sample was consecutive phacoemulsification cases unde...

this paper investigates different kinds of control predicates in persian subjunctive complements. first, it is shown that the obligatory control (oc) constructions syntactically consist of two subtypes exhaustive control (ec) and non-exhaustive control (nec). then building upon jackendoff and culicover (2003) and culicover and jackendoff’s (2005) semantic analysis of control which is devoted to...