This randomised controlled and double-blinded pilot study evaluated if interactive virtual reality balance related games integrated within conventional rehabilitation sessions resulted in more superior retraining of dynamic balance compared to CR after stroke. 19 subjects diagnosed with a recent episode of stroke were recruited from a local rehabilitation hospital and randomly assigned to eithe...

BACKGROUND Audits are often performed to assess the quality of clinical trial data, but beyond detecting fraud or sloppiness, the audit data are generally ignored. In an earlier study, using data from a nonrandomized study, Shepherd and Yu developed statistical methods to incorporate audit results into study estimates and demonstrated that audit data could be used to eliminate bias. PURPOSE I...

We performed an objective evaluation of 39 children whose behaviour was observed by their parents to improve on an artificial food additive free diet and to deteriorate with dietary lapses. Only 19 children completed a double blind placebo controlled challenge study with artificial food colours. In these children food colours were shown to have an adverse effect on a daily Conners' rating of be...

BACKGROUND Community-based recruitment is challenging particularly if the sampling frame is not easily defined as in the case of people who drink rainwater. Strategies for contacting participants must be carefully considered to maximise generalisability and minimise bias of the results. This paper assesses the recruitment strategies for a 1-year double-blinded randomised trial on drinking untre...

Twenty eight chronic schizophrenics were assigned in a double blind fashion to treatment with penfluridol or placebo for a period of 12 weeks. The clinical picture including the side effects were monitored regularly, whenever the clinical picture deteriorated haloperidol in individually adjusted doses was added to the treatment regimen. By the end of the study 12 out of the 14 placebo patients ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the sociodemographic and motivational characteristics of parents who volunteer their children for clinical research. DESIGN A questionnaire was administered to parents who volunteered their children for a randomised, double blind, placebo controlled trial of a drug to treat asthma and to a control group of parents whose children were eligible for the trial but had refus...

Background Double blind placebo controlled food challenge (DBPCFC) is the gold standard for food allergy diagnosis and outcome measure. However, one difficulty in performing DBPCFC is the lack of well-characterised and validated sources of allergens for incurrence into the challenge food vehicle. Here, we discuss the requirements for this characterisation using the peanut flour used during the ...

Efficacy of low dose levodopa in treatment of TD has been studied on 30 male inpatients with predefined selection criteria. The preliminary results are encouraging but long term double blind studies in larger samples are needed.

A long-standing problem in clinical research is distinguishing drug treated subjects that respond due to specific effects of the drug from those that respond to non-specific (or placebo) effects of the treatment. Linear mixed effect models are commonly used to model longitudinal clinical trial data. In this paper we present a solution to the problem of identifying placebo responders using an op...

1Center for Health-Related Social and Behavioral Sciences Research, Shahroud University of Medical Sciences, Shahroud, IR Iran 2School of Nursing & Midwifery, Shahroud University of Medical Sciences, Shahroud, IR Iran 4Candidate, School of Civil and Architectural Engineering, Shahrood University of Technology, Shahrood, IR Iran 5School of Pharmacy, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran,...