Journal of clinical epidemiology
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Multicenter Study
Five comorbidities reflected the health status in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: the newly developed COMCOLD index.
This study aimed to identify those comorbidities with greatest impact on patient-reported health status in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and to develop a comorbidity index that reflects their combined impact. ⋯ The COMCOLD index reflects the combined impact of five important comorbidities from patients' perspective and complements existing comorbidity indices that predict death. It may help clinicians focus on comorbidities affecting patients' health status the most.
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Propensity score (PS) analysis has been increasingly used in critical care medicine; however, its validation has not been systematically investigated. The present study aimed to compare effect sizes in PS-based observational studies vs. randomized controlled trials (RCTs) (or meta-analysis of RCTs). ⋯ In critical care literature, PS-based observational study is likely to report less beneficial effect of experimental treatment compared with RCTs (or meta-analysis of RCTs).
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To investigate the nocebo effect using randomized acupuncture trials that include sham and no-treatment groups. ⋯ Our findings suggest that (1) the nocebo effect of acupuncture is clinically meaningful and (2) the rate of patients with any adverse event may be a more appropriate indicator of the nocebo effect.
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This is the first reported study to determine the minimal clinically important difference (MCID) of Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Cognitive Function (FACT-Cog), a validated subjective neuropsychological instrument designed to evaluate cancer patients' perceived cognitive deterioration. ⋯ The estimates of 6.9-10.6 points as MCID can facilitate the interpretation of patient-reported cognitive deterioration and sample size estimates in future studies.