RATIONALE This study aimed to investigate the quality of reporting of anesthesia and euthanasia in experimental studies in small laboratory mammals published in the top ten impact factor journals. METHODS A descriptive systematic review was conducted and data was abstracted from the ten highest ranked journals with respect to impact factor in the categories 'Anesthesiology', 'Critical Care Me...

Drug development is a long and expensive process where each step should be carefully planned. During design stage of a clinical trial, the sample size calculation has to be performed based on a primary objective of the trial and target to achieve the desired power for detecting a clinically meaningful difference between test drug and standard/control at a fixed Type I Error rate. However, infor...

Health care utilization and outcome studies call for hierarchical approaches. The objectives were to predict major complications following percutaneous coronary interventions by health providers, and to compare Bayesian and non-Bayesian sample size calculation methods. The hierarchical data structure consisted of: (1) Strata: PGY4, PGY7, and physician assistant as providers with varied experien...

INTRODUCTION Psychological insulin resistance (PIR) is common among type II diabetes (DM) patients. Although interventions to reduce PIR have been suggested, there is no standardized intervention to reduce PIR. This trial aimed to assess the preliminary effectiveness of a well-structured interventional patient group (for sample size calculation for larger trials), as well as the acceptability a...

BACKGROUND Waiting time and costs from referral to day case outpatient surgery are at an unacceptably high level. The waiting time in Norway averages 240 days for common surgical conditions. Furthermore, in North Norway the population is scattered throughout a large geographic area, making the cost of travel to a specialist examination before surgery considerable. Electronic standardised referr...

BACKGROUND Neoadjuvant chemotherapy is a standard of care for patients with adenocarcinoma of the esophagus and stomach in Europe, but still only 20-40 % respond to therapy and the critical issue; how to treat nonresponding patients is still unclear. So far, there is no randomized trial evaluating the impact of early termination of neoadjuvant chemotherapy and immediate tumor resection in nonre...

BACKGROUND Non-inferiority trials are performed when the main therapeutic effect of the new therapy is expected to be not unacceptably worse than that of the standard therapy, and the new therapy is expected to have advantages over the standard therapy in costs or other (health) consequences. These advantages however are not included in the classic frequentist approach of sample size calculatio...