BACKGROUND Comprehensive literature searches are conducted over multiple medical databases in order to meet stringent quality standards for systematic reviews. These searches are often very laborious, with authors often manually screening thousands of articles. Information retrieval (IR) techniques have proven increasingly effective in improving the efficiency of this process. IR challenges for...

As an important public health issue, childhood depression deserves special attention, considering the serious and lasting consequences of the disease to child development. Taking this into consideration, the present study was based on the following question: what practical contributions to clinicians and researchers does the current literature on childhood depression have to offer? The objectiv...

PURPOSE We reviewed intervention studies that reported dementia caregiver outcomes published since 1996, including psychosocial interventions for caregivers and environmental and pharmacological interventions for care recipients. Our goal was to focus on issues of clinical significance in caregiver intervention research in order to move the field toward a greater emphasis on achieving reliable ...

OBJECTIVES To review the empirical literature to identify the activities, time spent and engagement of hospital managers in quality of care. DESIGN A systematic review of the literature. METHODS A search was carried out on the databases MEDLINE, PSYCHINFO, EMBASE, HMIC. The search strategy covered three facets: management, quality of care and the hospital setting comprising medical subject ...

Normal lung development follows a series of orchestrated events. Premature birth interrupts normal in utero lung development, which results in significant alterations in lung function and physiology. Increasingly, there are reports documenting the broad range of complications experienced by infants aged 34 to 36 weeks' gestational age (GA). Our objective was to summarize the evidence demonstrat...

BACKGROUND In recent years there has been a growing interest in the relationship between sedentary behaviour (sitting) and health outcomes. Only recently have there been studies assessing the association between time spent in sedentary behaviour and the metabolic syndrome. The aim of this study is to quantify the association between sedentary behaviour and the metabolic syndrome in adults using...

The use of high-throughput array and sequencing technologies has produced unprecedented amounts of gene expression data in central public depositories, including the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). The immense amount of expression data in GEO provides both vast research opportunities and data analysis challenges. Co-expression analysis of high-dimensional expression data has proven effective for...

INTRODUCTION Recent avoidable failures in patient care highlight the ongoing need for evidence to support improvements in patient safety. According to the most recent reviews, there is a dearth of economic evidence related to patient safety. These reviews characterise an evidence gap in terms of the scope and quality of evidence available to support resource allocation decisions. This protocol ...