Bmc Med Res Methodol
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Bmc Med Res Methodol · Apr 2009
Meta AnalysisQuality of reporting internal and external validity data from randomized controlled trials evaluating stents for percutaneous coronary intervention.
Stents are commonly used to treat patients with coronary artery disease. However, the quality of reporting internal and external validity data in published reports of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of stents has never been assessed.The objective of our study was to evaluate the quality of reporting internal and external validity data in published reports of RCTs assessing the stents for percutaneous coronary interventions. ⋯ The current reporting of results of RCTs testing stents needs to be improved to allow readers to appraise the risk of bias and the applicability of the results.
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Bmc Med Res Methodol · Apr 2009
Does direction of results of abstracts submitted to scientific conferences on drug addiction predict full publication?
Data from scientific literature show that about 63% of abstracts presented at biomedical conferences will be published in full. Some studies have indicated that full publication is associated with the direction of results (publication bias). No study has looked into the occurrence of publication bias in the field of addiction. ⋯ Clinical trials were the minority of abstracts presented at the CPDD; we found evidence of possible publication bias in the field of addiction, with negative or null results having half the likelihood of being published than positive ones.
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Bmc Med Res Methodol · Jan 2009
Using ordinal logistic regression to evaluate the performance of laser-Doppler predictions of burn-healing time.
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 dressings or surgery. In this paper, we do a statistical analysis of the performance of the technique. ⋯ Modeling healing time is a complex statistical problem, with random effects due to multiple burn areas per individual, and censoring caused by patients missing hospital visits and undergoing surgery. This analysis applies state-of-the art statistical methods such as the bootstrap and permutation tests to a medical problem of topical interest. New medical findings are that age and %TBSA are not important predictors of healing time when the LDI results are known, whereas gender does influence recovery time, even when blood flow is controlled for.The conclusion regarding the palette is that an optimum three-color palette can be chosen 'automatically', but the optimum choice of a 5-color palette cannot be made solely by optimizing the percentage of correct diagnoses.
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Bmc Med Res Methodol · Jan 2009
Comparative StudyMeta-Analyst: software for meta-analysis of binary, continuous and diagnostic data.
Meta-analysis is increasingly used as a key source of evidence synthesis to inform clinical practice. The theory and statistical foundations of meta-analysis continually evolve, providing solutions to many new and challenging problems. In practice, most meta-analyses are performed in general statistical packages or dedicated meta-analysis programs. ⋯ We have developed and validated a new program for conducting meta-analyses that combines the advantages of existing software for this task.
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Bmc Med Res Methodol · Jan 2009
Comparative StudyStratification of the severity of critically ill patients with classification trees.
Development of three classification trees (CT) based on the CART (Classification and Regression Trees), CHAID (Chi-Square Automatic Interaction Detection) and C4.5 methodologies for the calculation of probability of hospital mortality; the comparison of the results with the APACHE II, SAPS II and MPM II-24 scores, and with a model based on multiple logistic regression (LR). ⋯ With different methodologies of CTs, trees are generated with different selection of variables and decision rules. The CTs are easy to interpret, and they stratify the risk of hospital mortality. The CTs should be taken into account for the classification of the prognosis of critically ill patients.