Current medical research and opinion
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To know the dimensionality and internal consistency of the Tuberculosis-Related Stigma Scale in patients living with tuberculosis in Santa Marta, Colombia. ⋯ The Tuberculosis-Related Stigma Scale has an excellent internal consistency but poor goodness-of-fit indicators of unidimensionality. Evaluating the scale's psychometric performance is recommenced in future research.
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The Prescription Opioid Misuse and Abuse Questionnaire (POMAQ) was developed to identify prescription opioid misuse and abuse among patients with chronic pain. A clinical scoring algorithm was developed and refined to align with the patient experience. ⋯ The clinical scoring algorithm for the POMAQ was developed and refined to reflect clinically relevant patient behaviors identified by expert review. Future testing is needed to determine the sensitivity and specificity of this measure.
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Telehealth is delivering health care services remotely from healthcare facilities using telecommunications and virtual technology. Egypt is aiming to reach Universal Health Coverage; this increases the demand for telehealth in routine health services. Telehealth helps in increasing access to areas with no available medical services as patients can be monitored remotely. ⋯ Large percentages of attendees to primary health care centers are aware of telehealth and are willing to implement it. The major cause of refusal to implement telehealth was ignorance of using telecommunication devices and the desire to be in close contact with the physicians.
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Lactose intolerance (LI) is the failure to digest foods and beverages containing the lactose present in milk. LI can present by many digestive symptoms. ⋯ Modified CoMiSS is a simple, fast, and easy-to-use tool that can predict LI, with a cut-off value of >8, the Area under the ROC Curve was 0.998, sensitivity 89.5%, and specificity was 100%.
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Publication-associated plain language summaries are brief, jargon-free summaries of scientific publications. They are intended for a broad, non-expert audience to help maximize the accessibility of the publication. Plain language summaries are typically found alongside peer-reviewed publications or in supplementary materials and can be indexed in PubMed. In this narrative commentary, we present the perspectives of five day-to-day users of plain language summaries from different stakeholder groups, gained through semi-structured qualitative interviews about the users' experiences with and opinions of plain language summaries.