BACKGROUND Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a commonly occurring mental illness. There are multiple treatments for PTSD that have similar effectiveness, but these treatments differ substantially in other ways. It is desirable to have well-informed patients involved in treatment choices. A patient decision aid (PtDA) is one method to achieve this goal. This manuscript describes the ration...

INTRODUCTION Antipsychotic medications are commonly used in long-term care to treat neuropsychiatric symptoms of dementia despite concerns that their risks (eg, infection, falls, death) may outweigh their benefits. This study protocol outlines the development and pilot testing of a decision aid for antipsychotic medications that is tailored to the information needs of residents with dementia in...

This paper presents a clinical diagnosis support system which combines the advantages of Dempster-Shafer theory with Bayesian networks in order to simulate the uncertain medical reasoning. We propose a hierarchical structure using Dempster-Shafer at the upper level for evaluating more general hypothesis (disease groups) and Bayesian networks at the lower level for a more accurate analysis of sp...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the effectiveness of a decision aid for women with a breech presentation compared with usual care. DESIGN Randomised controlled trial. SETTING Tertiary obstetric hospitals offering external cephalic version (ECV). POPULATION Women with a singleton pregnancy were diagnosed antenatally with a breech presentation at term, and were clinically eligible for ECV. METHODS...

BACKGROUND Patients undergoing open-heart surgery frequently require one or more blood transfusions. Because of the risks of receiving blood from volunteer donors, some patients choose to donate their own blood before surgery. This reduces their risk of exposure to volunteer-donated blood, but it increases their chance of receiving any transfusion, either of self-donated or volunteer-donated bl...

BACKGROUND Decision aids have been shown to be useful in selected situations to assist patients in making treatment decisions. Important features such as the format of decision aids and their graphic presentation of data on benefits and harms of treatment options have not been well studied. METHODS In a randomized trial with a 3 x 2 factorial design, we investigated the effects of decision ai...

BACKGROUND Appropriate treatment for youth depression is an important public health priority. Shared decision making has been recommended, yet no decision aids exist to facilitate this. OBJECTIVES The main objective of this study was to evaluate an online decision aid for youth depression. DESIGN An uncontrolled cohort study with pre-decision, immediately post-decision and follow-up measure...

BACKGROUND In both developing countries and in relation to cultural minorities there have been calls to scale up mental health services and for evidence-informed policy and practice. EVIDENCE BASED MEDICINE The evidence based medicine movement has had a major influence in improving practice. However, implementation of this approach has some major difficulties. One that has been neglected is t...