(See the article by Coplan et al. on pages 426–33). Even without formal training in study design and biostatistics, clinicians can often use common sense, clinical judgment, and experience to help them decide which journal articles to pay attention to. Just as you do not have to be a professional baseball player to appreciate the subtleties of a well-played baseball game, most clini-cians have ...

In chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients, pulmonary rehabilitation is a nonpharmacological intervention aimed at improving physical exercise tolerance, dyspnoea and perceived quality of life. However, identifying predictors of clinical response and which patients achieve benefit remains a difficult question to answer with no conclusive data available. Baseline characteristics of...

[3] Riesenberg H, Lübbe AS. In-patient rehabilitation of lung cancer patients-a prospective study. Support Care Cancer 2009, in press. [4] Cesario A, Dall’Armi V, Cusumano G, Ferri L, Margaritora S, Cardaci V, Cafarotti S, Russo P, Paleari L, Sterzi S, Bonassi S, Granone P. Post-operative pulmonary rehabilitation after lung resection for NSCLC: a follow up study. Lung Cancer 2009;66:268—73. [5]...

Recently, numerous types of human dental derived‐mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been isolated and characterized, including dental pulp stem cells, stem cells from exfoliated deciduous teeth, periodontal liga‐ ment stem cells, dental follicle progenitor cells, alveolar bone‐derived MSCs, stem cells from apical papilla, tooth germ progenitor cells, and gin‐ gi...

IN PLANNING SPINE OPERATIONS, SURgeons have wide discretion. For pain-related surgery, consensus on indications for specific procedures (eg, decompression alone or decompression plus fusion) is generally lacking despite randomized trials for some condition and procedure combinations. Furthermore, individual surgeon preferences may outweigh patient and disease characteristics in choosing procedu...

Basophil activation is a key finding in allergic reactions and also observed quite frequently in infectious diseases and autoimmune disorders. In allergic reactions, basophil-derived mediators such as histamine, contribute essentially to clinical symptoms. During IgE-dependent degranulation of basophils, a number of cell surface membrane and cytoplasmic molecules become activated, show altered ...

Pulsations of the brain were observed and noted since antiquity. Galenic concepts that the brain pulsations propel psychic pneuma to the nerves were challenged during the Renaissance and replaced by other theories. During the age of the Enlightenment, scientists began to study by observation and experiment whether these pulsations were generated by the dura mater, the respiratory movements or t...

Surgical resection remains the standard of care for clini- cally localized renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Nearly 1 in 4 patients will have a recurrence after surgery performed with curative intent, and stand to benefit from additional therapy. Currently, no proven adjuvant or neoadjuvant therapies are available. A number of phase 3 adjuvant therapy trials are ongoing that are evaluating small-mole...

This paper considers the problem of estimating the average con trolled direct e ect ACDE of a treatment on an outcome in the presence of unmeasured confounders between an intermediate variable and the outcome Such confounders render the direct e ect unidenti able even in cases where the total e ect is unconfounded hence identi able Kaufman et al applied a linear programming software to nd the m...