Evidence-based medicine (EBM) stresses the examination of evidence from clinical research and describes it as a shift in medical paradigms, in contrast to intuition, unsystematic clinical experience, and pathophysiologic rationale. While the importance of randomized trials has been created by the concept of the hierarchy of evidence in guiding therapy, much of the medical research is observatio...

Several studies have demonstrated serious omissions in the way research that use animals is reported. In order to improve the quality of reporting of animal experiments, the Animals in research: reporting in vivo experiments (ARRIVE) Guidelines were published in the British Journal of Pharmacology in August 2010. However, not only the quality of reporting of completed animal studies needs to be...

The identification of dog hair through mtDNA analysis has become increasingly important in the last 15 years, as it can provide associative evidence connecting victims and suspects. The evidential value of an mtDNA match between dog hair and its potential donor is determined by the random match probability of the haplotype. This probability is based on the haplotype's population frequency estim...

While the importance of improving horse-related safety seems self-evident, no comprehensive study into understanding or reducing horse-related risk has been undertaken. In this paper, we discuss four dimensions of horse-related risk: the risk itself, the horse, the rider and the culture in which equestrian activities takes place. We identify how the ways in which risk is constructed in each dim...

BACKGROUND The emergence of multi-drug resistant Gram-negatives (MDRGNs) coupled with an alarming scarcity of new antibiotics has forced the optimization of the therapeutic potential of available antibiotics. To exploit the time above the minimum inhibitory concentration mechanism of β-lactams, prolonging their infusion may improve outcomes. The primary objective of this meta-analysis was to de...

This article reviews some of the ethical issues that arise in environmental health research with human subjects, such as minimizing risks to subjects, balancing benefits and risks in research, intentional exposure studies with human subjects, protecting third parties in research, informing subjects about environmental hazards, communicating health information to subjects, and protecting privacy...

Microbicides represent a potential intervention strategy for preventing HIV transmission. Vaginal microbicides would meet the need for a discreet method that women could use to protect themselves against HIV. Although early-generation microbicides failed to demonstrate efficacy, newer candidates are based on more potent antiretroviral (ARV) products. Positive data from the CAPRISA 004 trial of ...

OBJECTIVES to analyze continence and complications rates after male slings as first line surgical treatment, in order to improve patient counseling for the management of SUI postprostatectomy. METHOD A MedLine search using specified search terms was done on January 23, 2012. This research rendered 160 records. RESULTS No controlled trial was available for analysis. The majority of papers de...

This study synthesized scientific literature that applies genetic or genomic approaches to breastmilk. A literature search of PubMed was conducted in March 2012 using the key words "breast milk," "lactation," "genetic," "gene expression," and "epigenetic." Additional articles were identified/selected for evaluation with MeSH term searches, and a review of article reference lists was obtained fr...

Obstructive sleep apnea is an exciting area for orthodontists to be involved. The level of awareness of sleep apnea and related health issues is growing rapidly. The demand of integrating sleep into the orthodontic practice shortly will be driven by the need of the societies as some of our patients will be shortly coming into our offices aware of sleep apnea. However, with our busy clinical ort...