abstract background: keratoconus is a bilateral corneal disease, which one way to cure it is to transplant. the transplantation may be rejected by recipient's immune system, which leads to failure of the graft. this study aimed to analysis the factors affecting bilateral corneal graft rejection based on copula function. methods: a sample of bilateral graft rejection times was assessed. since co...

background : to prepare safe and adequate blood supply to meet patients’ needs and ensure a sufficient number of regular blood donors, knowledge about factors encouraging people to donate blood regularly is essential. considering its importance, we aimed to identifying the effective factors of the return to blood donation in based on zero-inflated count regression models using bayesian approach...

conclusions treating obesity, increasing physical activity and quality of married life are proposed as practical solutions to reduce bp. background hypertension is considered as a major public health problem in most countries due to its association with ischemic heart disease which causes cerebrovascular disease and death. objectives the purpose of the present study was to study factors affecti...

Background: Biologic agents and small molecules have shown long term benefit when added in patients with active RA non-responders to conventional DMARDs treatment (1). In head-to-head trials only adalimumab was compared other drugs combination methotrexate, some evidence of superiority but no data on multiple comparisons been reported (2). The availability biosimilar led clinical practice prefe...

BACKGROUND Network meta-analysis (NMA) enables simultaneous comparison of multiple treatments while preserving randomisation. When summarising evidence to inform an economic evaluation, it is important that the analysis accurately reflects the dependency structure within the data, as correlations between outcomes may have implication for estimating the net benefit associated with treatment. A m...

UNLABELLED The XENDOS study showed that behavioural and pharmacological therapy can decrease the risk of metabolic disorders in obese patients. METHODS A probabilistic Bayesian Markov model simulating the outcomes of orlistat treatment on the obese Italian population has been developed with the WinBUGS software. The model integrates an algorithm to estimate cardiovascular risk based on Framin...

BACKGROUND Estimates of the sensitivity and specificity for new diagnostic tests based on evaluation against a known gold standard are imprecise when the accuracy of the gold standard is imperfect. Bayesian latent class models (LCMs) can be helpful under these circumstances, but the necessary analysis requires expertise in computational programming. Here, we describe open-access web-based appli...

BACKGROUND Two approaches are commonly used for identifying high-performing facilities on a performance measure: one, that the facility is in a top quantile (eg, quintile or quartile); and two, that a confidence interval is below (or above) the average of the measure for all facilities. This type of yes/no designation often does not do well in distinguishing high-performing from average-perform...

BACKGROUND Closed-loop insulin delivery is an emerging treatment for type 1 diabetes (T1D) evaluated clinically and using computer simulations during pre-clinical testing. Efforts to make closed-loop systems available to people with type 2 diabetes (T2D) calls for the development of a new type of simulators to accommodate differences between T1D and T2D. Presented here is the development of a m...