BACKGROUND Fibromyalgia (FM) is a prevalent and disabling disorder characterized by a history of widespread pain for at least three months. Pain is considered a complex experience in which affective and cognitive aspects are crucial for prognosis. The aim of this study is to assess the importance of pain-related psychological constructs on function and pain in patients with FM. METHODS DES...

The application of ergonomics in product design is essential to its accessibility and usability. The development of manual devices should be based on ergonomic principles. Effort perception analysis is an essential approach to understand the physical and subjective aspects of the interface. The objective of the present study was to analyze the effort perception during a simulated task with diff...

STUDY DESIGN Translation and validation of the Early Onset Scoliosis-24 Questionnaire (EOSQ-24). OBJECTIVE To cross-culturally adapt the American English version of the EOSQ-24 into Spanish language, and to assess its reliability and discriminative validity. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA Treatment of early-onset scoliosis (EOS) seeks to improve natural history and health-related quality of lif...

BACKGROUND To establish whether a previously validated scoring system (Habib) for the prediction of risk or likelihood of posterior capsule rupture during phacoemulsification surgery could be used to: 1. Predict the difficulty of a phacoemulsification case, and 2. Select appropriate phacoemulsification cases for trainees. METHODS The study sample was consecutive phacoemulsification cases unde...

We propose a method for learning Markov network structures for continuous data without invoking any assumptions about the distribution of the variables. The method makes use of previous work on a non-parametric estimator for mutual information which is used to create a non-parametric test for multivariate conditional independence. This independence test is then combined with an efficient constr...

The Audit Commission in the UK recommends that patient information leaflets (PILs) should be audited by health professionals using a formal readability test. However, no such study on antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) has been identified in a Medline search. The aim of this study was to audit the readability of PILs prepared for marketed proprietary AEDs in the UK. Twelve PILs were compared with six a...

When you are assessing the quality of the evidence, it’s not how the data are analyzed that’s important. Far more important is how the data are collected. Don’t agonize over whether the researchers should have used a non-parametric test or whether a random effects meta-analysis is appropriate (just to cite two obscure examples). These are important issues and they generate a lot of debate. But ...

BACKGROUND There are inconsistent reports about multiple sclerosis (MS) risk among migrants from low to high MS risk geographical regions. This study assessed the overall MS incidence and evaluated seasonality in birth and subsequent MS risk later in the life in second generation of migrants born and lived in Kuwait. METHODS We assessed the overall and gender-specific MS risk in second genera...