BACKGROUND As patients become more involved in their medical care, they must consider the specific probabilities of both positive and negative outcomes associated with different treatments. Patients who are low in numeracy may be at a disadvantage when making these decisions. This study examined the use of a "spinner" to present probabilistic information compared to a numerical format and icon ...

Use of Disulfiram under supervision in well-motivated alcoholics is effective in reducing relapse rates. Several adverse effects, some of them life-threatening, have been reported due to the drug. An awareness of the adverse effects is useful to keep a follow up and sustain patient compliance with the drug. This study of 158 out patients on daily oral disulfiram revealed that though many patien...

We use high-quality longitudinal data to analyze the existence of a health selectivity effect among Nicaraguans migrating to Costa Rica and to the U.S, using as comparison group the population of stayers. Our theoretical framework with two alternative destinations predicts that the healthiest will choose migration to the U.S. The results are even stronger for chronic diseases. Within-household ...

We consider a class of cure rate frailty models for multivariate failure time data with a survival fraction. This class is formulated through a transformation on the unknown population survival function. It incorporates random effects to account for the underlying correlation, and includes the mixture cure model and the proportional hazards cure model as two special cases. We develop efficient ...

Chronic pancreatitis is an inflammatory, usually painful disease characterized by progressive fibrosis and the loss of exocrine and endocrine functions. Pain influences the quality of life of patients and may lead to inability to work and frequent hospitalisation. The pathogenesis of pain in chronic pancreatitis is still unclear. Several different mechanisms of pain have been proposed, but pain...

objective(s): due to the prevalence and pervasiveness of stress in modern life and exposure to both chronic and acute stresses, it is not clear whether prior exposure to chronic stress can influence the impairing effects of acute stress on memory retrieval. this issue was tested in this study. materials and methods: adult male wistar rats were randomly assigned to the following groups: control,...

Sexuality is an important topic across the life continuum. Research has shown that sexuality or intimacy declines with age. This has been attributed to several factors, including but not limited to age-related changes, changes in vasculature, hormones, endocrine function, chronic disease, and psychosocial effects. Limited research has been provided on the effect diabetes mellitus may have on se...

UNLABELLED Opioids are commonly used to treat patients with chronic pain (CP), though there is little evidence that they are effective for long term CP treatment. Previous studies reported strong associations between passage of medical cannabis laws and decrease in opioid overdose statewide. Our aim was to examine whether using medical cannabis for CP changed individual patterns of opioid use. ...

BACKGROUND Chronic sleep debt is becoming increasingly common and affects millions of people in more-developed countries. Sleep debt is currently believed to have no adverse effect on health. We investigated the effect of sleep debt on metabolic and endocrine functions. METHODS We assessed carbohydrate metabolism, thyrotropic function, activity of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis, and s...

Abstract Background: Opium-dependence having different effects on the nervous system is a common problem, especially in the Middle East and Iran. The aim of this study is evaluating the effects of opium-dependence on visual evoked potential (VEP) in men. Methods: Thirty subjects with both chronic cigarette smoking and opium-dependence (group 1) and 30 subjects with only chronic ciga...