OBJECTIVE Some argue that health plans have minimal impacts on quality of care and that quality data collection should focus only on physician organizations. We investigate the relative impact of physician organizations and health plans on quality measures. DESIGN Statistical analysis of data on 9 Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) measures from 6 health plans and 159 p...

BACKGROUND This study proposed to assess the autonomic nervous system (ANS) functions in fibromyalgia (FM) by using two electrophysiological tests, sympathetic skin response (SSR) and the heart rate variability named R-R interval variation (RRIV). METHODS Sympathetic skin response and RRIV were studied in 29 female patients with FM and 22 healthy age-matched female controls. R-R interval vari...

Given the importance of cardiovascular disease (CVD) to public health and the demonstrated heritability of both disease status and its related risk factors, identifying the genetic variation underlying these susceptibilities is a critical step in understanding the pathogenesis of CVD and informing prevention and treatment strategies. Although one can look for genetic variation underlying suscep...

Steers from research crossbreeding projects (n = 406) were serially scanned using real-time ultrasound at 35-d intervals from reimplant time until slaughter. Cattle were evaluated for rump fat depth, longissimus muscle area (ULMA), 12th-rib fat thickness (UFAT), and percentage of intramuscular fat (IMF) to determine the ability of ultrasound to predict carcass composition at extended periods be...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Significance and management of blood pressure (BP) changes in acute stroke care are unclear. Here, we aimed to investigate the impact of 24-hour BP variability (BPV) on outcome in patients with acute ischemic stroke treated with intravenous thrombolysis. METHODS From the Safe Implementation of Treatment in Stroke International Stroke Thrombolysis registry, 28 976 patien...

BACKGROUND Understanding the role for genetic factors in human heart failure is difficult because environmental factors cannot be standardized and genetic variation is great. One approach to identify genes that modify disease outcome is to use mouse models that show strong genetic variation of the disease phenotype. METHODS AND RESULTS In this study, we used transgenic mice that develop sever...

BACKGROUND The Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (III) is a tool developed in a Western setting. AIM To evaluate the development of a group of inner city children in South Africa with no neonatal risk factors using the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (III), to determine an appropriate cut-off to define developmental delay, and to establish variation in scores don...

OBJECTIVES Sjögren's syndrome is a chronic inflammatory disease. The detection of chronic inflammatory infiltrates containing >50 lymphocytes (lymphocytic focus) per 4 mm2 tissue in minor salivary gland biopsies is a diagnostic parameter of the disease. The aim of the study was to examine if an increase in the tissue area of a single minor labial salivary gland biopsy through serial histologica...

BACKGROUND The Rheumatoid Arthritis Impact of Disease (RAID) score was developed as a European League Against Rheumatism initiative to obtain a patient reported outcome score for clinical trials in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), based on patients' perception of the impact of the disease on several domains of health. The objective of this study was to assess the content validity of thi...

This study tries to establish a new method for the evaluation of skin lesion extension and progression in systemic sclerosis (SSc) patients. Plica thickness measurements of 200 healthy subjects and 19 SSc patients by plicometer were performed, and an arbitrary plicometer skin score was created. The plicometer skin score was compared to m-Rodnan's score on the same patients. The statistical asso...