BACKGROUND A complete, correct and timely discharge letter can communicate important information from the hospital to the general practitioner. The adequacy of the letter may vary with the patient and admission characteristics of the patient. Insight in the association between these characteristics and the presence and quality of the discharge letter will give rise to improvement activities for...

tial multicentre ones not funded by industry, which together have been cited over 800 times in the literature already, that have confirmed that there are indeed no special advantages of atypical antipsychotics in the treatment of schizophrenia and, compared with conventional anti-psychotic drugs, they are not costeffective. I deliberately put the word ‘‘confirmed’’ in italics because the wordin...

The validity of studies that assess the effectiveness of an intervention (EoI) depends on variables such as the type of study design, the quality of their methodology, and the participants enrolled. Five leading veterinary journals and 5 leading human medical journals were hand-searched for EoI studies for the year 2013. We assessed (1) the prevalence of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) amon...

The FISE (Federazione Italiana Sport Equestri) Pindar is a multicentre research project aimed at testing the potential effects of therapeutic riding on schizophrenic patients. Twenty-four subjects with a diagnosis of schizophrenia were enrolled for a 1 year-treatment involving therapeutic riding sessions. All subjects were tested at the beginning and at the end of treatment with a series of val...

As VLSI geometry continues to shrink and the level of integration increases, it is expected that the probability of faults, particularly transient faults, will increase in future microprocessors. So far, fault tolerance has chiefly been considered for special purpose or safety critical systems, but future technology will likely require integrating fault tolerance techniques into commercial syst...

Objective. Prior research has found consistent support that rumination and insomnia are important risk factors for depressive symptoms. The aim of the present cross-sectional study is to examine the interaction between these two previously well-established risk factors (i.e., rumination and insomnia) in the explanation of depressive symptoms. Design. A total of 417 participants (277 women) with...

OBJECTIVE The ethicists believe that the goal of clinical research is to benefit future and not current (trial) patients. Many clinicians believe that the clinical trial enrolment offers best management for their patients. The objective of our study was to identify the situations when a clinical trial is beneficial for the patients enrolled in the trial and future patients. DESIGN Factorial v...

The objective of this study was to clarify the status of occupational health and safety services for immigrant workers, the barriers to employing immigrant workers and the needs of the managers in workplaces to keep immigrant workers healthy and safe. This study was a cross-sectional survey. We sent self-administered questionnaires to 126 workplaces in the western part of Shizuoka Prefecture, J...

objective(s) developing and validating a simple, efficient, reproducible and economic reversed phase high performance liquid chromatographic (rp-hplc) method for the quantitative determination of pefloxacin in bulk material, tablets and in human plasma. materials and methods a shim-pack clc-ods column and a mobile phase constituting acetonitrile: 0.025 m phosphoric acid solution (13:87 v/v, ph ...

background hepatitis b virus (hbv) infection is a serious global health problem that is associated with huge social and economic costs. early antiviral drugs, such as interferon-α2b, peginterferon-α2a, lamivudine, and adefovir, all have their limitations (such as low responses or safety concerns) in clinical application. telbivudine and entecavir are two of the latest nucleotide drugs and both ...