Migraine is a recurring and disabling pain disorder. The prevalence is estimated as 9.1% in Taiwan. Patients suffer from significant loss of work, time at school or ability to perform household chores, as well as other family or leisure activities. Treatment strategies during migraine attacks should be tailored based on the severity of disability. Stewart and Lipton (1999) developed the Migrain...

Atmospheric boundary layer winds experience two types of effects due to friction at the ground surface. One effect is the increase of the wind speeds with height above the surface. The second effect, called the Ekman layer effect, entails veering the change of the wind speed direction as a function of height above the surface. In this study a practical procedure is developed within a databaseas...

BACKGROUND The uncertainty about long-term effects of childbirth presents MS patients with dilemmas. METHODS Based on clinical data of 330 female MS patients, the long-term effects of childbirth were analysed, using a cross-sectional study design. Four groups of patients were distinguished: (1) without children (n = 80), (2) with children born before MS onset (n = 170), (3) with children born...

The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) is conducting the first national study of the quality of the Canadian hospital discharge data contained in the Discharge Abstract Database (DAD). The study is aimed at measuring discrepancies, identifying sources of error, and providing users of the study with statistically reliable information about the data quality of the DAD. The study wil...

OBJECTIVES We sought to examine the associations between participation in a worksite fitness center and worker productivity. METHODS A modified Work Limitations Questionnaire (WLQ) and employees' short-term disability claims were used as productivity measures with multivariate logistic regression models to control for health risk, age, gender, and work location. RESULTS Nonparticipants in a...

Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS ́s) is a technology that provides users with a speech based interaction with machines to carry out several activities in the pursuit of their goals (information retrieval, business transactions, automatic translation, etc.). Development of this kind of systems needs an evaluation process to show the real system performance, to identify implementation errors, etc. The...