Observational studies provide a rich source of information for assessing effectiveness of treatment interventions in many situations where it is not ethical or practical to perform randomized controlled trials. However, such studies are prone to bias from hidden (unmeasured) confounding. A promising approach to identifying and reducing the impact of unmeasured confounding is prior event rate ra...

PURPOSE Zonisamide is licensed for adjunctive therapy for partial-onset seizures with or without secondary generalisation in patients 6 years and older and as monotherapy for the treatment of partial seizures in adult patients with newly diagnosed epilepsy, and shows a favourable pharmacokinetic profile with low interaction potential with other drugs. The aim of the present study was to gather ...

The Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) Observational Study (OS) was established to explore the predictors and natural history of important causes of morbidity and mortality in postmenopausal women, and to serve as a secular control for the WHI Clinical Trial (CT). It enrolled 93,676 ethnically diverse women born in four different decades, from those who came of age in the depression-era, to the fi...

Chemotherapy medication errors may lead to potentially harmful consequences while most of them could be preventable. This study aims to determine the incidence and type of drug handling and administration errors among the nurses and to identify possible contributing factors. Setting of the study was a teaching hospital affiliated to Shahid Beheshti University of Medic...

Individual actions such as the purchase of a machine or the changing or a price are often discrete and infrequent. Macroeconomic models, however, often ignore this intermittent behavior. In this paper, we present conditions under which a representative agent model, which ignores discrete adjustment on the individual level, is observationally equivalent to a model that takes discrete adjustment ...

PURPOSE Although elevated blood pressure (BP) predicts future cardiovascular events, recommended BP targets often is not reached in the general community. In a clinical real-life setting we evaluated BP impact and tolerability of the angiotensin-II receptor blocker telmisartan in patients with essential hypertension. PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients in this observational study not at target BP s...