Journal of clinical epidemiology
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We aimed to determine if specialist journals implement specific Consolidated Standards for Reporting Trials (CONSORT) recommendations to the same extent as general medical journals. ⋯ General medical and specialist journals that endorse CONSORT do not enforce reporting issues consistently, with specialty journals lagging behind general medical journals.
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Multicenter Study
Members of research ethics committees accepted a modification of the randomized consent design.
The use of randomized consent designs has been subject of methodologic and ethical controversy. In most Western countries, research ethics committees make the decision as to whether a randomized consent design can be applied. The purpose of the study is to assess to what extent a randomized consent design and a modification of this design is accepted by research ethics committees, in terms of ethics, health law, and methodology. ⋯ the modified randomized consent design appears to be more acceptable than the randomized consent design. To increase consistency in the way research ethics committees handle study protocols, a discussion about the use of randomized consent designs appears necessary.
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Whereas pain is frequently measured using a visual analog scale (VAS) that can examine change over short time intervals in the same subject, such ratings are not useful in analyzing differences across subjects. We created a method for normalizing VAS pain reporting to control for the variation between different populations due to the differences in subjective perception or objective evaluation of pain. ⋯ It is possible to standardize VAS pain ratings to compare pain between different populations.
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Physical function is an important measure of success of many medical and surgical interventions. Ability to adjust for comorbid disease is essential in health services research and epidemiologic studies. Current indices have primarily been developed with mortality as the outcome, and are not sensitive enough when the outcome is physical function. The objective of this study was to develop a self-administered Functional Comorbidity Index with physical function as the outcome. ⋯ This new index contains diagnoses such as arthritis not found on indices used to predict mortality, and the FCI explained more variance in PF scores compared to indices designed to predict mortality.
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We assessed the validity and utility of a claims-based ICD-9-CM algorithm for identifying preferred provider organization (PPO) enrollees ages 18-64 years at high risk for influenza complications. ⋯ A claims-positive record was highly indicative of the presence of high-risk conditions, but such claims missed a large proportion of PPO enrollees with high-risk conditions. It is important to assess the validity of administrative data in different age groups.