Methods to assess the role of stress factors in patients with medical conditions are often rather complex, require specific training, and are difficult to use in clinical practice. We attempted to develop a short index tailored to a busy clinical setting, which would be easy to use while providing adequate individual information. This index (Psychosocial Index) was largely derived from well-est...

tine patches (37% between years 1 and 3) and in a study using supportive counselling and nicotine gum for 5 years (40% between years 1 and 5). High relapse rates after 1 year are also common in those not attending for treatment. A large general population survey estimated a relapse rate of 35% from non-validated self reports of the duration of abstinence. Success rates after 1 year or less of f...

BACKGROUND Ischemic heart disease (IHD) affects at least 150,000 veterans annually in the United States. Lowering serum cholesterol has been shown to reduce coronary events, cardiac death, and total mortality among high risk patients. Electronic clinical reminders available at the point of care delivery have been developed to improve lipid measurement and management in the Veterans Health Admin...

This continuing research looks into how professionals search, judge, utilise, and communicate information in order to complete work-related tasks and smooth collaborative information behaviour in the workplace. Specifically, this paper reports results from a case study of judgment of information quality behaviour of a marketing professional during information seeking and use at workplace. The p...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To investigate the associations of various types of employment with six self reported health indicators, taking into account the part played by demographic variables, individual working conditions and four ecological indicators at the country level. DESIGN Cross sectional survey (structured interview) of a sample of the active population of 15 European countries aged 15 years ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the effectiveness of supervised exercise therapy compared with usual care with respect to recovery, pain, and function in patients with patellofemoral pain syndrome. DESIGN Open label randomised controlled trial. SETTING General practice and sport physician practice. PARTICIPANTS Patients with a new episode of patellofemoral pain syndrome recruited by their general pra...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To investigate the effect of socioeconomic status throughout the lifecourse on self reported mental health at age 50 years. DESIGN Prospective cohort study SETTING Community setting in Newcastle upon Tyne, north east England. PARTICIPANTS 503 subjects from a birth cohort assembled in 1947 who completed the 28 item version of the general health questionnaire (GHQ-28). MAI...

WHO reported that adherence among patients with chronic diseases averages only 50% in developed countries. This is recognized as a significant public health issue, since medication nonadherence leads to poor health outcomes and increased healthcare costs. Improving medication adherence is, therefore, crucial and revealed on many studies, suggesting interventions can improve medication adherence...

This paper demonstrates our Web Service based N-Version model, WS-FTM (Web Service-Fault Tolerance Mechanism), which applies this well proven technique to the domain of Web Services to increase system dependability. WS-FTM achieves transparent usage of replicated Web Services by use of a modified stub. The stub is created using tools included in WS-FTM. Our initial implementation includes a sim...

OBJECTIVES To determine the relative incidence of gun victimization versus self defense gun use by civilians in the United States, and the circumstances and probable legality of the self defense uses. METHODS National random digit dial telephone surveys of the adult population were conducted in 1996 and 1999. The Harvard surveys appear unique among private surveys in two respects: asking (1) ...