objective(s): reliability measures precision or the extent to which test results can be replicated. this is the first ever systematic review to identify statistical methods used to measure reliability of equipment measuring continuous variables. this studyalso aims to highlight the inappropriate statistical method used in the reliability analysis and its implication in the medical practice.   m...

objective: the sheehan disability scale (sds) assesses disability in four domains of home management, work responsibilities, close relationships and social life. the main objective of this study was to develop the persian version of the sds. method: two steps of field work followed the persian translation and cultural adaptation of the tool: first, the internal consistency and convergent validi...

background in the golestan cohort study that was launched to investigate the causes of esophageal cancer, a complete biospecimen bank was established for storage of collected blood, urine, hair, and nail samples. the objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of nail samples as a biomarker of selected trace elements status. methods thirty toenail samples were selected randomly from...

Resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) is widely used to noninvasively study human brain networks. Network functional connectivity is often estimated by calculating the timeseries correlation between blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) signal from different regions of interest (ROIs). However, standard correlation cannot characterize the direction of information flow between regions. In this pa...

Physiologically based pharmacokinetic models are being used in an increasing number of different areas. However, they are perceived as complex, data hungry, resource intensive, and time consuming. In addition, model validation and verification are hindered by the relative complexity of the equations. To begin to address these issues a web application called MEGen for the rapid construction and ...

AIM Boor et al developed and validated the questionnaire D-RECT (Dutch Residency Educational Climate Test ) to measure the clinical learning environment within the medical specialist training. In this study, a German version of this questionnaire (D-RECT German) is analyzed regarding testtheoretical properties. PROBLEM Are the results of Boor et al replicable as a proof for validity of the qu...

We extend the nonstandard finite difference method of solution to the study of pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic models. Pharmacokinetic (PK) models are commonly used to predict drug concentrations that drive controlled intravenous (I.V.) transfers (or infusion and oral transfers) while pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic (PD) interaction models are used to provide predictions of drug concentrati...

A Validation Study of Transgenerational Effects of Childhood Conditions on the Third Generation Offspring’s Economic and Health Outcomes Potentially Driven by Epigenetic Imprinting At the crossroads of economics and human biology, this paper examines the extent to which pre-puberty nutritional conditions in one generation affect productivity-related outcomes in later generations. Recent studies...

Hundreds of genetic variants have been associated to common diseases through genome-wide association studies (GWAS), yet there are limits to current approaches in detecting true small effect risk variants against a background of false positive findings. Here we addressed the missing heritability problem, aiming to test whether there are indeed risk variants within GWAS statistical noise and to ...