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MEDICAL NEWS: Partial verification refers to the situation where a subset of patients is not verified by the reference (gold) standard and is excluded from the analysis. If partial verification is present, the observed (naive) measures of accuracy such as sensitivity and specificity are most likely to be biased. Recently, Harel and Zhou showed [...]

MEDICAL NEWS: Partial verification refers to the situation where a subset of patients is not verified by the reference (gold) standard and is excluded from the analysis. If partial verification is present, the observed (naive) measures of accuracy such as sensitivity and specificity are most likely to be biased. Recently, Harel and Zhou showed [...]

VIOXX CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT UPDATE:
Partial settlement payments will soon be in the mail to those people who claim that taking Vioxx caused them to suffer heart attacks, the Associated Press is reporting. Vioxx is the pain reliever that was linked to heart failure and has since been removed from the market.  Payments are scheduled to [...]

MEDICAL NEWS: We describe a non-parametric multiple imputation method that recovers the missing potential censoring information from competing risks failure times for the analysis of cumulative incidence functions. The method can be applied in the settings of stratified analyses, time-varying covariates, weighted analysis of case-cohort samples and clustered survival data analysis, where no current [...]

MEDICAL NEWS: Background:
Results from clinical trials are usually summarized in the form of sampling distributions. When
full information (mean, SEM) about these distributions is given, performing meta-analysis is straightforward.
However, when some of the sampling distributions only have mean values, a challenging issue is to decide how
to use such distributions in meta-analysis. Currently, the most common [...]

MEDICAL NEWS: Background:
Measurement of socioeconomic position (SEP) over the life course in population health surveillance systems is important for examining differences in health and illness between different population groups and for monitoring the impact of policies and interventions aimed at reducing health inequities and intergenerational disadvantage over time. While face-to-face surveys are considered [...]

MEDICAL NEWS:
Background  Patient medical records are important means of communication among health care providers. Limited evaluation has been performed of the quality of the medical records or its association with health care processes or outcomes.
Methods  We performed an empirical evaluation of the completeness of medical records from 607 randomly selected patients admitted with non–ST-segment elevation [...]

MEDICAL NEWS: Trauma is a term used in medicine for describing physical injury. The prospective evaluation of the care of injured patients aims to improve the management of a trauma system and acts as an ongoing audit of trauma care. One of the principal techniques used to evaluate the effectiveness of trauma care at [...]

MEDICAL NEWS: Background:
In trials designed to estimate rates of perinatal mother to child transmission of HIV, HIV assays are scheduled at multiple points in time. Still, infection status for some infants at some time points may be unknown, particularly when interim analyses are conducted.
Methods:
Logistic regression models are commonly used to estimate covariate-adjusted transmission rates, [...]

MEDICAL NEWS:
Abstract

BACKGROUND  Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is performed in maNY (New York) patients with stable coronary artery disease, despite evidence
of little clinical benefit over optimal medical therapy.

OBJECTIVE  To examine physicians’ beliefs, practices, and decision-making regarding elective PCI.

DESIGN  Six focus groups, three with primary care physicians and three with cardiologists. Participants discussed PCI using hypothetical
case [...]

MEDICAL NEWS: In survey sampling, information about the prevalence of a health outcome Y for a defined target population is frequently obtained using a two-stage data collection process. In the first stage, households that have members of the target population are identified and socio-demographic data that are believed to be associated with Y are [...]

MEDICAL NEWS: Studies pertaining to childhood psychopathology often incorporate information from multiple sources (or informants). For example, measurement of some factor of particular interest might be collected from parents, teachers as well as the children being studied. We propose a latent variable modeling framework to incorporate multiple informant predictor data. Several related models are [...]