Many countries, including the United States, Canada, European Union member states, and others, require that a comprehensive search for possible alternatives be completed before beginning some or all research involving animals. Completing comprehensive alternatives searches and keeping current with information associated with alternatives to animal testing is a challenge that will be made easier...

OBJECTIVE To elicit prescribers' preferences for behavioural economics interventions designed to reduce inappropriate antibiotic prescribing, and compare these to actual behaviour. DESIGN Discrete choice experiment (DCE). SETTING 47 primary care centres in Boston and Los Angeles. PARTICIPANTS 234 primary care providers, with an average 20 years of practice. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Re...

Increased use of whole effluent toxicity (WET) tests in the regulatory arena has brought increased concern over the statistical analysis of WET test data and the determination of toxicity. One concern is the issue of statistical power. A number of WET tests may pass the current hypothesis test approach because they lack statistical power to detect relevant toxic effects because of large within-...

BACKGROUND Implementation of noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) as a highly accurate aneuploidy screening test has raised questions around whether the high uptake may result in more terminations of pregnancies and fewer births of children with Down syndrome (DS). AIM The aim of the study was to investigate the impact of NIPT on termination and live birth rates for DS. METHODS Literature re...

We developed a protocol of noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT), employing a higher-resolution picodroplet digital PCR, to detect genetic imbalance in maternal plasma DNA (mpDNA) caused by cell-free fetal DNA (cffDNA). In the present study, this approach was applied to four families with autosomal recessive (AR) congenital sensorineural hearing loss. First, a fraction of the fetal DNA in mpDNA w...