OBJECTIVES Our goal is to validate diagnosing and characterizing epilepsy based on a medical record survey by external reviewers. METHODS We reviewed medical records from 80 patients who received antiepileptic drugs in 2009 at two hospitals. The study consisted of two steps; data abstraction by certified health record administrators and then verification by the investigators. The gold standar...

This study aimed to identify instruments for measuring children's attitudes towards their peers with disabilities that are suitable for use in epidemiological studies and to report on their psychometric properties. A literature review was conducted to identify instruments measuring at least one of the three components of children's attitudes (affective, behavioural, or cognitive measures) towar...

Assessing calcium intake is necessary for epidemiological studies on osteoporosis. This study was aimed at developing a valid food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) to estimate the dietary calcium intake of Japanese people. The FFQ contains 26 items, representing common sources of calcium. The respondents, 74 women aged 15 - 79 years living in Fukui city, whose dietary calcium intake was estimated ...

The purpose of the study was to develop a valid and reliable tool for use in assessing motor skills in preschool children in field based settings. The development of the CHAMPS (Children’s Activity and Movement in Preschool Study) Motor Skills Protocol (CMSP) included evidence of its reliability and validity for use in field-based environments as part of large epidemiological studies. Following...

BACKGROUND Although caries and malocclusion occur with a high prevalence in Chinese school-age children, there were no appropriate instrument to assess the oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) for this population. The aim of our study was to develop a Chinese (Mandarin) version of the Child Oral Health Impact Profile-Short Form 19 (COHIP-SF 19) and provide a preliminary test of its psyc...

OBJECTIVE To test the feasibility of creating a valid and reliable checklist with the following features: appropriate for assessing both randomised and non-randomised studies; provision of both an overall score for study quality and a profile of scores not only for the quality of reporting, internal validity (bias and confounding) and power, but also for external validity. DESIGN A pilot vers...

This study investigated the reliability of self-reported ancestry by comparing the interview responses of probands and their siblings. A total of 546 sibling pairs were ascertained in a family-based study of susceptibility genes for Parkinson’s disease and asked to identify maternal and paternal countries of origin. Probands were recruited prospectively from the Department of Neurology of the M...

1 Division of Population Health and Information, Alberta Cancer Board, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. 2 Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. 3 Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Centre, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, TN. 4 Division of Cancer Control and Population Sci...