To explore pregnant women's use, attitudes, knowledge and beliefs of complementary and alternative drugs (CADs) defined as products manufactured from herbs or with a natural origin. A preliminary survey was conducted among 172 pregnant women in their third trimester of pregnancy, consecutively recruited in two obstetrical settings; 15 women were randomly selected to compute a test-to-retest ana...

OBJECTIVE This research was designed to identify the validity and reliability of the Persian version of Denver Developmental Screening Test II (DDST-II) in Iranian children, in order to provide an appropriate developmental screening tool for Iranian child health workers. METHODS At first a precise translation of test was done by three specialists in English literature and then it was revised ...

This project examined the feasibility, validity, and reliability of the plank isometric hold for children 8-12 years of age. 1502 children (52.5% female) performed partial curl-up and/or plank protocols to assess plank feasibility (n = 823, 52.1% girls), validity (n = 641, 54.1% girls) and reliability (n = 111, 47.8% girls). 12% (n = 52/431) of children could not perform a partial curl-up, but ...

Fifty isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex were tested for susceptibility to pyrazinamide (PZA) by the ESP (Trek Diagnostic Systems, Westlake, Ohio) and BACTEC (BD Biosciences, Sparks, Md.) test systems. Initial results showed concordance for 48 of the isolates. On retest, the two discordant isolates were resolved in favor of the ESP system. The ESP Myco susceptibility test system gen...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the validity, in terms of the patients' acceptance, preference, feasibility and reliability of an innovative, interactive computerized system for collection of patient-reported outcome (PRO) data on axial SpA against the paper-and-pencil version. METHODS Fifty-five patients with axial SpA completed both the touch screen and the paper-and-pencil set of questionnaires. A c...

Results: Factor analysis of the scale confirmed the fit of the original’s 6-dimensions: perception of self, perception of future, structured style, social competence, family cohesion, and social resources (2 = 1104, df = 480, 2/df = 2.3; RMSEA = 0.055; TLI = 0.90; CFI = 0.91). The 6-dimensions structure explained 53.5% of the total variance. The Social Comparison Scale and Locus of Control Sc...

BACKGROUND This study presents a new questionnaire to assess schema modes: the Schema Mode Inventory (SMI). METHOD First, the construction of the short SMI (118 items) was described. Second, the psychometric properties of this short SMI were assessed. More specifically, its factor structure, internal reliability, inter-correlations between the subscales, test-retest reliability and monotonica...

Let M be a finite module over a noetherian ring R with a free resolution of length 1. We consider the generalized Koszul complexes Cλ̄(t) associated with a map λ̄ : M → H into a finite free R-module H (see [IV], section 3), and investigate the homology of Cλ̄(t) in the special setup when grade IM = rankM = dimR. (IM is the first non-vanishing Fitting ideal of M .) In this case the (interesting) ho...

An instrument was developed to measure the effects of a desensitization program on hand hypersensitivity. It was standardized with 40 "normal" subJects ages 20 to 40 of both sexes and two ethnic groups. Results showed reliability coefficients ranging from .74 to .82 for the three modalities employed in the test. Analyses of variance of agreement between test and retest scores revealed no signif...

This note first characterizes the class of all stabilizing controllers for a two-degree-of-freedom control system which achieve a prescribed achievable transfer function. The characterization is in terms of an arbitrary proper stable transfer function. With this characterization, robust model matching is formulated as a standard Hm-optimization problem. This means that standard controller desig...