BACKGROUND Ischemic heart disease (IHD) mortality has been on the decline in the United States for decades. However, declines in IHD mortality have been slower in certain groups, including young women and black individuals. HYPOTHESIS Trends in IHD vary by age, sex, and race in New York City (NYC). Young female minorities are a vulnerable group that may warrant renewed efforts to reduce IHD. ...

Resting-state fMRI (R-fMRI) has shown considerable promise in providing potential biomarkers for diagnosis, prognosis and drug response across a range of diseases. Incorporating R-fMRI into multi-center studies is becoming increasingly popular, imposing technical challenges on data acquisition and analysis, as fMRI data is particularly sensitive to structured noise resulting from hardware, soft...

Cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease, exhibiting spatial and temporal variations that pose challenges for designing robust therapies. Here, we propose the VEPART (Virtual Expansion of Populations for Analyzing Robustness of Therapies) technique as a platform that integrates experimental data, mathematical modeling, and statistical analyses for identifying robust optimal treatment protocols....

Over 59 million workers are employed in the healthcare sector globally, with a daily risk of being exposed to a complex variety of health and safety hazards. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of arts activity on the well-being of nursing staff. During October-December 2014, 115 nursing staff working in a hospital, took part in this study, which lasted for 10 weeks. The int...

BACKGROUND In typically developing children, participation in sports has been proven to be positively correlated to both physical and psychosocial health outcomes. In children and adolescents with a physical disability or chronic disease participation in both recreational and competitive sports is often reduced, while for this population an active lifestyle may be even more important in reachin...

In recent years, an increasing number of studies have used Voxel Based Morphometry (VBM) to compare a single patient with a psychiatric or neurological condition of interest against a group of healthy controls. However, the validity of this approach critically relies on the assumption that the single patient is drawn from a hypothetical population with a normal distribution and variance equal t...

BACKGROUND Health care researchers working in the Arabian Gulf need information on how to optimize recruitment and retention of study participants in extremely culturally diverse settings. Implemented in Doha, Qatar in 2012 with 4 language groups, namely Arabic, English, Hindi, and Urdu, this research documents persons' responses to recruitment, consent, follow-up, and reminder procedures durin...

BACKGROUND Khat is a psycho-stimulant herb, which has been in use in traditional societies in East Africa and the Middle East over many centuries. Although khat is reported to cause various health problems, what constitutes problematic khat use has never been systematically investigated. This study explored the acceptable and problematic uses of khat from the perspective of users. METHODS The...

BACKGROUND To evaluate public perceptions towards the causes of depression and schizophrenia and identifications of factors resulting stigma towards mental ill. METHOD A cross-sectional study was conducted among the inhabitants of Pulau-Pinang, Malaysia in March, 2009. A 24-item questionnaire was used to obtain respondent views. A non-probability (i.e convenient sampling method) was used to a...

This chapter reviews the literature on variable selection in nonparametric and semiparametric regression models via shrinkage. We highlight recent developments on simultaneous variable selection and estimation through the methods of least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso), smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) or their variants, but restrict our attention to nonparametric a...