This paper develops a method for appraising health status in elderly people. A frailty index was defined as the proportion of accumulated deficits (symptoms, signs, functional impairments, and laboratory abnormalities). It serves as an individual state variable, reflecting severity of illness and proximity to death. In a representative database of elderly Canadians we found that deficits accumu...

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a chronic gastrointestinal (GI) disorder with a severe impact on quality of life (QoL). We explored the relationship of a visual measure of suffering, the PRISM-RII, with quality of life (QoL) and anxiety measures in IBS patients. Participants were 44 IBS patients who completed several questionnaires and kept a symptom diary for two weeks. The measures used wer...

OBJECTIVE To determine the effect of adjunctive quetiapine therapy on the sleep architecture of patients with bipolar or unipolar depression. METHODS This is a prospective, single-blind, repeated measures polysomnographic study. Sleep architecture was analyzed by overnight polysomnography, and subjective sleep quality was measured using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. The Hamilton Rating ...

OBJECTIVE To test the causal relationships among the components of sociodemographic (age, gender, education, and income), illness characteristics (duration of illness, severity of illness, and comorbid diseases), and self-management ability, and health status in the model of health status of patients with heart failure (HSHF). DESIGN : Descriptive cross-sectional study. MATERIALS AND METHOD...

This study provides psychometric data for the Addiction Severity Index (ASI) when administered to persons with severe and persistent mental disorders. Participants were 97 outpatients (26 women) at a public psychiatric facility. The internal consistency of the composite scores was lower in this psychiatric sample than in previous nonpsychiatric samples. Interrater reliability was acceptable for...

Prognostic modelling involves grouping patients by risk of adverse outcome, typically by stratifying a severity of illness index obtained from a classifier or survival model. The assignment of thresholds on the risk index depends of pairwise statistical significance tests, notably the log-rank test. This paper proposes a new methodology to substantially improve the robustness of the stratificat...

OBJECTIVE We examined the interdependent, dyadic, mental health of adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer patients and their caregivers. Our aims were as follows: (1) to investigate the degree to which patients' and caregivers' subjective perceptions of illness severity are congruent with objective severity (i.e., medical indicators), (2) to compare patients' and caregivers' subjective percept...

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