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The purpose of this article is to describe and evaluate the methodology of online focus group discussions within the setting of paediatric oncology.
The feasibility of randomized trials often depends on successful patient recruitment. Although numerous recruitment barriers have been identified it is unclear which of them complicate recruitment most. Also, ...
In this study we explored the challenges to establishing a community of practice (CoP) to address standards in general practice. We focused on the issue of improving referral letters which are the main form of...
In neonatal trials of pre-term or low-birth-weight infants, twins may represent 10–20% of the study sample. Mixed-effects models and generalized estimating equations are common approaches for handling correlat...
Laser-Doppler imaging (LDI) of cutaneous blood flow is beginning to be used by burn surgeons to predict the healing time of burn wounds; predicted healing time is used to determine wound treatment as either dr...
The problem of missing studies in meta-analysis has received much attention. Less attention has been paid to the more serious problem of double counting of evidence.
Multivariate analysis of interval censored event data based on classical likelihood methods is notoriously cumbersome. Likelihood inference for models which additionally include random effects are not availabl...
Extraneous distractions may influence the flow of general practice consultations. This study piloted a methodology to examine the impact of interrupting general practitioners (GPs) while consulting actor-patie...
Attributable fractions (AF) assess the proportion of cases in a population attributable to certain risk factors but are infrequently reported and mostly calculated without considering potential confounders. Wh...
Assessing agreement in method comparison studies depends on two fundamentally important components; validity (the between method agreement) and reproducibility (the within method agreement). The Bland-Altman l...
Kappa is commonly used when assessing the agreement of conditions with reference standard, but has been criticized for being highly dependent on the prevalence. To overcome this limitation, a prevalence-adjust...
To compare the diagnostic accuracy of two continuous screening tests, a common approach is to test the difference between the areas under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. After study partici...
Quality assessment tools for primary studies of test accuracy are relatively well developed, although only one is validated (QUADAS), but very little work has been done to develop tools to quality-assess studi...
In meta-analysis, the presence of funnel plot asymmetry is attributed to publication or other small-study effects, which causes larger effects to be observed in the smaller studies. This issue potentially mean...
It can be challenging for patients and clinicians to properly interpret a change in the clinical condition after a treatment has been given. It is not known to which extent spontaneous improvement, effect of p...
Many epidemiologic studies report the odds ratio as a measure of association for cross-sectional studies with common outcomes. In such cases, the prevalence ratios may not be inferred from the estimated odds r...
The heterogeneity statistic I 2, interpreted as the percentage of variability due to heterogeneity between studies rather than sampling error, depends on precision, that is, the size of the studies included.
The practice of dichotomizing a continuous outcome variable does not make use of within-category information. That means the loss of information. This study compared two approaches in the modelling of the asso...
The National Database for Nursing Quality Indicators® (NDNQI®) was established in 1998 to assist hospitals in monitoring indicators of nursing quality (eg, falls and pressure ulcers). Hospitals participating in N...
Additional insights into patient preferences can be gained by supplementing discrete choice experiments with best-worst choice tasks. However, there are no empirical studies illustrating the relative advantage...
A common feature of diagnostic research is that results for a diagnostic gold standard are available primarily for patients who are positive for the test under investigation. Data from such studies are subject...
There is little information on the validity of using record linkage with routinely collected data for case ascertainment of stroke in large population-based studies in the UK. We examined the accuracy of these...
Primary health care clinicians are being encouraged to undertake qualitative research, however the in-depth interviewing skills required are not as straightforward as might be first supposed. While there are b...
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an important cause of acquired disability. In evaluating the effectiveness of clinical interventions for TBI it is important to measure disability accurately. The Glasgow Outcom...
Epidemiological and other studies that require participants to respond by completing a questionnaire face the growing threat of non-response. Response rates to household telephone surveys are diminishing becau...
The objective of most biomedical research is to determine an unbiased estimate of effect for an exposure on an outcome, i.e. to make causal inferences about the exposure. Recent developments in epidemiology ha...
In population studies, body mass index (BMI) is generally calculated from self-reported body weight and height. The self-report of these anthropometrics is known to be biased, resulting in a misclassification ...
Principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least square (PLS) regression may be useful to summarize the HIV genotypic information. Without pre-selection each mutation presented in at least one patient is c...
Edwards's method is a widely used approach for fitting a sine curve to a time-series of monthly frequencies. From this fitted curve, estimates of the seasonal intensity of occurrence (i.e., peak-to-low ratio o...
Database systems have been developed to store data from large medical trials and survey studies. However, a reliable data storage system does not guarantee data entering reliability.
Within cluster randomized trials no algorithms exist to generate a full enumeration of a block randomization, balancing for covariates across treatment arms. Furthermore, often for practical reasons multiple b...
The incidence of Type 2 diabetes is increasing worldwide and diabetes is four times more common among ethnic minority groups than among the general Caucasian population. This study reflects on the specific iss...
There is no standardized method for the assessment of physical activity (PA). Therefore it is important to investigate the validity and comparability of different measures. The International Physical Activity ...
The hepatitis C virus (HCV) is hyper-endemic in injecting drug users. There is also excess HCV among non-injection drug users who smoke, snort, or sniff heroin, cocaine, crack, or methamphetamine.
Maintaining data quality and integrity is important for research studies involving prospective data collection. Data must be entered, erroneous or missing data must be identified and corrected if possible, and...
Studies have shown that industry-sponsored meta-analyses of drugs lack scientific rigour and have biased conclusions. However, these studies have been restricted to certain medical specialities. We compared al...
Body mass index (BMI) data usually have skewed distributions, for which common statistical modeling approaches such as simple linear or logistic regression have limitations.
The beta-binomial model is one of the methods that can be used to validly combine event rates from overdispersed binomial data. Our objective is to provide a full description of this method and to update and b...
Some populations targeted in survey research can be hard to reach, either because of lack of contact information, or non-existent databases to inform sampling. Here, we present a methodological "case-report" o...
Results from clinical trials are usually summarized in the form of sampling distributions. When full information (mean, SEM) about these distributions is given, performing meta-analysis is straightforward. How...
The paper examines the key issues experienced in recruiting and retaining practice involvement in a large complex intervention trial in Australian General Practice.
Measurement of socioeconomic position (SEP) over the life course in population health surveillance systems is important for examining differences in health and illness between different population groups and f...
This paper focuses on measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of two diagramming methods employed in key informant interviews with clinicians and health care administrators. The two methods are 'participato...
Regression to the mean (RTM) occurs in situations of repeated measurements when extreme values are followed by measurements in the same subjects that are closer to the mean of the basic population. In uncontro...
Preventive drugs require long-term trials to show their effectiveness or harms and often a lot of changes occur during post-marketing studies. The purpose of this article is to describe the research process in...
Vignette studies of medical choice and judgement have gained popularity in the medical literature. Originally developed in mathematical psychology they can be used to evaluate physicians' behaviour in the sett...
Investigators are actively testing interventions intended to increase lifespan and wish to test whether the interventions increase maximum lifespan. Based on the fact that one cannot be assured of observing po...
Despite its benefits, it is uncommon to apply the nested case-control design in diagnostic research. We aim to show advantages of this design for diagnostic accuracy studies.
To create and find accurate and reliable instruments for the measurement of physical activity has been a challenge in epidemiological studies. We investigated the reliability and validity of two different phys...
In trials designed to estimate rates of perinatal mother to child transmission of HIV, HIV assays are scheduled at multiple points in time. Still, infection status for some infants at some time points may be u...
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