Living with cancer: “Good” days and “bad” days—What produces them?

Living with cancer: "good" days and "bad" days--what produces them? Can the McGill quality of life questionnaire distinguish between them?

BACKGROUND To determine the impact of care on quality of life (QOL), or to detect a change in QOL over time, measures of QOL must remain stable when QOL is stable (test-retest reliability) and change when QOL changes (responsiveness). This study addresses these issues for the McGill Quality of Life Questionnaire (MQOL). Unlike other studies that use disease status to indicate whether QOL has re...

Living with a symptomatic rotator cuff tear ‘bad days, bad nights’: a qualitative study

BACKGROUND Rotator cuff tears are a common cause of shoulder pain. There is an absence of information about symptomatic rotator cuffs from the patients' perspective; this limits the information clinicians can share with patients and the information that patients can access via sources such as the internet. This study describes the experiences of people with a symptomatic rotator cuff, their sym...

Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time

Good days and bad days in dementia: a qualitative chart review of variable symptom expression.

BACKGROUND Despite its importance in the lived experience of dementia, symptom fluctuation has been little studied outside Lewy body dementia. We aimed to characterize symptom fluctuation in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mixed dementia. METHODS A qualitative analysis of health records that included notations on good days and bad days yielded 52 community-dwelling patients (women,...

HMGB1 in cancer: good, bad, or both?

Forty years ago, high mobility group box 1 (HMGB1) was discovered in calf thymus and named according to its electrophoretic mobility in polyacrylamide gels. Now, we know that HMGB1 performs dual functions. Inside the cell, HMGB1 is a highly conserved chromosomal protein acting as a DNA chaperone. Outside of the cell, HMGB1 is a prototypical damage-associated molecular pattern, acting with cytok...