BACKGROUND Historically controlled studies are commonly undertaken in paediatric oncology, despite their potential biases. Our aim was to compare the outcome of the control group in randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in paediatric oncology with those anticipated in the sample size calculations in the protocols. Our rationale was that, had these RCTs been performed as historical control studies...

PURPOSE This study was undertaken to determine whether the Adult Identity Mentoring (AIM) project successfully promotes abstinence, delays initiation of sex, and decreases intention to engage in sex. METHODS Twenty middle school classes of African-American seventh graders were randomly assigned to receive either the AIM intervention or a standard health education control curriculum. The AIM i...

In comparing the mean count of two independent samples, some practitioners would use the t-test or the Wilcoxon rank sum test while others may use methods based on a Poisson model. It is not uncommon to encounter count data that exhibit overdispersion where the Poisson model is no longer appropriate. This paper deals with methods for overdispersed data using the negative binomial distribution r...

INTRODUCTION Health services quality has been the most important criteria of judging, and its improvement causes people's satisfaction of health systems. In a health system, public and private sectors provide services and typically have been effective in promoting health services quality of community. The aim of this study was to compare the quality of health services in both public and private...

STUDY OBJECTIVES The psychomotor vigilance test (PVT) is among the most widely used measures of behavioral alertness, but there is large variation among published studies in PVT performance outcomes and test durations. To promote standardization of the PVT and increase its sensitivity and specificity to sleep loss, we determined PVT metrics and task durations that optimally discriminated sleep ...

CONSISTENCY OF DIFFERENTIALLY EXPRESSED GENE RANKINGS BASED ON SUBSETS OF MICROARRAY DATA DakeYang July 21, 2011 Data derived from gene expression microarrays are frequently used to identify candidate genes which can characterize and distinguish between two biological phenotypes. A key step in this process is the selection of an appropriate test statistic to identify which genes are differentia...

In the present study, we examined whether the ARNTL (BMAL1) rs2278749 T/C polymorphism was associated with the susceptibility to Alzheimer disease (AD). This case-control study examined the genotypes of apolipoprotein E (APOE e4) and BMAL1 rs2278749 T/C using restriction fragment length polymorphism and the TaqMan assay, respectively. A total of 296 unrelated AD patients and 423 control subject...