Journal of the Chinese Medical Association : JCMA
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Academic publications are important for developing a medical specialty or discipline. Since family medicine is a rapidly growing medical specialty in Taiwan, this study aimed to analyze family medicine publications from 1993 to 2012 in Taiwan using the Web of Science database. ⋯ Publications from departments/institutes of family medicine in Taiwan increased rapidly from 1993 to 2012. However, the trends of decreased citation number of articles and journal impact factor, as well as the small amount of articles published in the Primary Health Care Category, deserve further attention and effort.
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Observational Study
Survival analysis of postoperative nausea and vomiting in patients receiving patient-controlled epidural analgesia.
Postoperative nausea and vomiting as well as postoperative pain are two major concerns when patients undergo surgery and receive anesthetics. Various models and predictive methods have been developed to investigate the risk factors of postoperative nausea and vomiting, and different types of preventive managements have subsequently been developed. However, there continues to be a wide variation in the previously reported incidence rates of postoperative nausea and vomiting. This may have occurred because patients were assessed at different time points, coupled with the overall limitation of the statistical methods used. However, using survival analysis with Cox regression, and thus factoring in these time effects, may solve this statistical limitation and reveal risk factors related to the occurrence of postoperative nausea and vomiting in the following period. ⋯ Survival analysis using Cox regression showed that the average consumption of opioids played an important role in postoperative nausea and vomiting, a result not found by logistic regression. Therefore, the incidence of postoperative nausea and vomiting in patients cannot be reliably determined on the basis of a single visit at one point in time.