BACKGROUND Routinely collected electronic patient records are already widely used in epidemiological research. In this work we investigated the potential for using them to identify endpoints in clinical trials. METHODS The events recorded in the West of Scotland Coronary Prevention Study (WOSCOPS), a large clinical trial of pravastatin in middle-aged hypercholesterolaemic men in the 1990s, we...

AIMS To conduct a service evaluation of usability and utility on-line clinical audit tools developed as part of a UK Classification of Diabetes project to improve the categorisation and ultimately management of diabetes. METHOD We conducted the evaluation in eight volunteer computerised practices all achieving maximum pay-for-performance (P4P) indicators for diabetes; two allowed direct obser...

We have observed previously that DNA template-directed polymerization by the type 1 human immunodeficiency virus reverse transcriptase is error-prone for single-nucleotide substitution, addition and deletion errors at homopolymeric sequences. We have also noted strong termination of processive synthesis at these positions (Bebenek, K., Abbotts, J., Roberts, J. D., Wilson, S. H., and Kunkel, T. ...

As coded clinical data are used in a variety of areas (e.g. health services funding, epidemiology, health sciences research), coding errors have the potential to produce far-reaching consequences. In this study the causes and consequences of miscoding were reviewed. In particular, the impact of miscoding due to inadequate medical documentation on hospital funding was examined. Appropriate reimb...

Dried plant herbarium specimens are potentially a valuable source of DNA. Efforts to obtain genetic information from this source are often hindered by an inability to obtain amplifiable DNA as herbarium DNA is typically highly degraded. DNA post-mortem damage may not only reduce the number of amplifiable template molecules, but may also lead to the generation of erroneous sequence information. ...

The role of the nucleotide excision repair (NER) pathway in removal of DNA ethylation damage was investigated by means of hprt mutational spectra analysis in the NER-deficient Chinese hamster ovary cell line UV5, which lacks ERCC2/XPD, and in its parental cell line AA8. Both cell lines were exposed to ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) or N-ethyl-N-nitrosourea (ENU). EMS gave a similar dose-dependent...

Background: The purpose of this study was to investigate the rate of coding errors and its effect on the amount of correct reimbursement to patients. Methods: This descriptive and cross-sectional study was performed in 2018. Research resources were records in compensation units in medical documents center of social security organization. A total of 546 re...