OBJECTIVE Our objective was to estimate the effectiveness of disease-modifying drugs (DMDs) in delaying multiple sclerosis (MS) disability progression in relapsing-onset (R-onset) definite MS patients under "real-world" conditions. METHODS Treatment effect size, for DMDs as a class, was estimated in absolute terms and relative to MS natural history. A basic model estimated annual Expanded Dis...

Background: Information about COVID-19 patients must be studied meticulously to control the COVID-19 pandemic more effectively. This study aimed to evaluate the clinical and epidemiological features of COVID-19 patients in Rafsanjan County.   Materials and Methods: In this descriptive study, data of 3,212 patients referred to the Ali-Ibn Abitaleb Hospital in Rafsanjan County, Iran were recorde...

IT has been said that college teaching is the only profession for which there is no professional training, and it is commonly argued that this is because our graduate schools train scholars and scientists rather than teachers. We are more concerned with the discovery of knowledge than with its dissemination. But can we justify ourselves quite so easily? It is a bold thing to say that we know ho...

In time-to-event analyses, artificial censoring with correction for induced selection bias using inverse probability-of-censoring weights can be used to 1) examine the natural history of a disease after effective interventions are widely available, 2) correct bias due to noncompliance with fixed or dynamic treatment regimens, and 3) estimate survival in the presence of competing risks. Artifici...

Background Quality and efficiency in the Emergency Department (ED) concerns clinicians and administrators worldwide because of an increasing number of patients and a desire for optimizing flow, avoiding crowding, and increasing the quality of the treatment. For patients referred to an Acute Admission Unit (AAU), which is a sub unit in the ED, the physicians have to obtain a medication history a...

BACKGROUND Vigabatrin (VGB) is an anti-epileptic medication which has been linked to peripheral constriction of the visual field. Documenting the natural history associated with continued VGB exposure is important when making decisions about the risk and benefits associated with the treatment. Due to its speed the Swedish Interactive Threshold Algorithm (SITA) has become the algorithm of choice...

A broad class of engineering problems including penetration, tmpact and large rotations of solid bodies causes severe numerical problems. For these problems, the constitutive equations are history dependent so material points must be followed; this is difficult to implement in a Eulerian scheme. On the other hand, purely Lagrangian methods typically result in severe mesh distortion and the cons...

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge an...

AIM To propose a simple tool for early prediction of unfavourable long term evolution of multiple sclerosis (MS). METHODS A Bayesian model allowed us to calculate, within the first year of disease and for each patient, the Bayesian Risk Estimate for MS (BREMS) score that represents the risk of reaching secondary progression (SP). RESULTS The median BREMS scores were higher in 158 patients w...