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...

The analysis of longitudinal repeated measures data is frequently complicated by missing data due to informative dropout. We describe a mixture model for joint distribution for longitudinal repeated measures, where the dropout distribution may be continuous and the dependence between response and dropout is semiparametric. Specifically, we assume that responses follow a varying coefficient rand...

BACKGROUND Although non-normal data are widespread in biomedical research, parametric tests unnecessarily predominate in statistical analyses. METHODS We surveyed five biomedical journals and - for all studies which contain at least the unpaired t-test or the non-parametric Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test - investigated the relationship between the choice of a statistical test and other variables ...

Longitudinal studies often gather joint information on time to some event (survival analysis, time to dropout) and serial outcome measures (repeated measures, growth curves). Depending on the purpose of the study, one may wish to estimate and compare serial trends over time while accounting for possibly non-ignorable dropout or one may wish to investigate any associations that may exist between...

We apply nonparametric regression models to estimation of demand curves of the type most often used in applied research. From the demand curve estimators we derive estimates of exact consumers surplus and deadweight loss, that are the most widely used welfare and economic efficiency measures in areas of economics such as public finance. We also develop tests of the symmetry and downward sloping...

Performance on some neuropsychological tests is best expressed as an intra-individual measure of association (such as a parametric or non-parametric correlation coefficient or the slope of a regression line). Examples of the use of intra-individual measures of association (IIMAs) include the quantification of performance on tests designed to assess temporal order memory or the accuracy of time ...

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H funds’ extensive use of derivatives, short selling, and leverage and their dynamic trading strategies create significant nonnormalities in their return distributions. Hence, the traditional performance measures fail to provide an accurate characterization of the relative strength of hedge fund portfolios. This paper uses the utility-based nonparametric and parametric performance measures to d...