Background: This study aims to explore the extent to which the perceived oral conditions predict adolescent global life satisfaction (GLS); Methods: The sample in a cross-sectional survey consisted of 1510 Lithuanian adolescents (41.7% boys) aged 11-18. The survey was conducted by means of self-report questionnaires that were administrated in school classrooms ensuring confidentiality and anony...

Three methods of synthesizing correlations for meta-analytic structural equation modeling (SEM) under different degrees and mechanisms of missingness were compared for the estimation of correlation and SEM parameters and goodness-of-fit indices by using Monte Carlo simulation techniques. A revised generalized least squares (GLS) method for synthesizing correlations, weighted-covariance GLS (W-C...

the empirical bayes estimators of treatment effects in a factorial experiment were derived and their asymptotic properties were explored. it was shown that they were asymptotically optimal and the estimator of the scale parameter had a limiting gamma distribution while the estimators of the factor effects had a limiting multivariate normal distribution. a bootstrap analysis was performed to ill...

Medical practice guidelines (GLs) being tools that are mainly designed to evaluate medical professionals, it sounds logical, and fair, that professionals should in turn evaluate GLs. Microbiology being a medical discipline, we used the AGREE instrument, i.e. an established evaluation tool for GLs, in order to evaluate the quality of two major microbiology guidelines, i.e. the SFM GLs and the AS...

We present a generalized Newton method and a quasiNewton method for solving H(x) := F(nc(x))+x-nc(x) = 0, when C is a polyhedral set. For both the Newton and quasi-Newton methods considered here, the subproblem to be solved is a linear system of equations per iteration. The other characteristics of the quasi-Newton method include: (i) a g-superlinear convergence theorem is established without a...

Background—Although global left ventricular systolic function is an important determinant of mortality, standard measures such as ejection fraction (EF) and wall motion score index (WMSI) have important technical limitations. The aim of this study was to compare global longitudinal speckle strain (GLS), an automated technique for measurement of long-axis function, with EF and WMSI for the predi...

BACKGROUND Left ventricular (LV) global longitudinal strain (GLS) is a measure of the active shortening of the LV in the longitudinal direction, which can be assessed with speckle-tracking echocardiography. The aims of this evaluation were to validate the prognostic value of GLS as a new index of LV systolic function in a large cohort of patients with chronic ischemic cardiomyopathy and to dete...

AIMS 2 dimensional (2D) strain analysis detects subclinical left ventricular (LV) systolic dysfunction. Our aim was to evaluate changes in LV systolic and diastolic function in breast cancer patients early after anthracycline chemotherapy, and to identify predisposing factors. METHODS AND RESULTS 140 patients were assessed by detailed echocardiography before and within seven days post treatme...

Instrumental variable (IV) methods based on the physician’s prescribing preference may remove bias due to unobserved confounding in pharmacoepidemiologic studies. However, IV estimates, originally defined as the treatment prescribed for a single previous patient of a given physician, show important variance inflation. The authors proposed and validated in simulations a new method to reduce the ...

BACKGROUND Predicting which individuals will have a decline in left ventricular (LV) function after pacemaker implantation remains an important challenge. We investigated whether LV global longitudinal strain (GLS), measured by 2D speckle tracking strain echocardiography, can identify patients at risk of pacing-induced left ventricular dysfunction (PIVD) or pacing-induced cardiomyopathy (PICMP)...