All societies face the need to make judgments about what interventions (both public health and personal medical) to provide to their populations under reasonable resource constraints. Their decisions should be informed by good evidence and arguments from health technology assessment (HTA). But if HTA restricts itself to evaluations of safety, efficacy, and cost-effectiveness, it risks being vie...

Maternal depression was recently conceptualized as a network of interacting symptoms. Prior studies have shown that low self-efficacy, as an index of maternal functioning, is one important source of stress that worsens depression. We have limited information, however, on the specific relationships between depression symptoms and self-efficacy. In this study, we used regularized partial correlat...

Generic drugs should be interchangeable with originators in terms of quality and efficacy. With relative lower prices, generic drugs are playing an important role in controlling health expenditures and ensuring access. However, the widespread understanding of "cheap price equals low quality" has a negative impact on the acceptance of generic drugs. In China, medical doctors doubt the efficacy a...

OBJECTIVES We assessed the feasibility of delivering the Otago Exercise Programme (OEP) via an interactive DVD (ie, OEP-DVD) in combination with monthly physical therapist phone calls to older adults. DESIGN This pre-post (baseline and 6-month follow-up) study included an intervention group (n=61) based in a rural location and a control group (n=21) based in a city. SETTING Sechelt and Vanc...

HIV-infected patients are at increased risk for both vaccine-preventable diseases and their complications, with mortality rates higher than in non-HIV-infected individuals. Consequently, international guidelines generally recommend inactivated vaccines in HIV-patients, even if HIV-related immunodeficiency may impair efficacy; live vaccines are usually not recommended in these patients because o...

BACKGROUND Recent data have called into question the reliability and predictive validity of standard admission procedures to medical schools. Eliciting non-cognitive attributes of medical school applicants using qualitative tools and methods has thus become a major challenge. METHODS 299 applicants aged 18-25 formed the research group. A set of six research tools was developed in addition to ...

Husband's/partner's support for family planning may influence a women's modern contraceptive use. Socio-demographic factors, couple communication about family planning, and fertility preferences are known to play a role in contraceptive use. We conducted logistic regression analysis to investigate the relationship between perceived husband's/partner's approval and husband's/partner's encouragem...

Self-efficacy beliefs are used to explain a range of behaviors and aspects of the pain experience. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between academic self-efficacy, social self-efficacy, emotional self-efficacy and psychological hardiness with pain self-efficacy in students. 167 students of Persian Gulf university were selected randomly. The research tools consist of Nicho...

Background & aim: In some situations in quantitative or qualitative research, complementary tools would be of great help in data collection. Vignette is a data collection tool, which has been used for over 50 years in different disciplines including health sciences. Nonetheless, there is a paucity of information regarding this method. With this background in mind, the ...