BACKGROUND The placement of medical research news on a newspaper's front page is intended to gain the public's attention, so it is important to understand the source of the news in terms of research maturity and evidence level. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We searched LexisNexis to identify medical research reported on front pages of major newspapers published from January 1, 2000 to Decemb...

OBJECTIVES To identify the prevalence of frailty among inpatient older adults in a clinical hospital and check the association of the socioeconomic and clinical characteristics with the state of frailty. METHOD Observational, cross-sectional and analytical study, conducted with 255 hospitalized patients. Materials used: structured instrument for the economical and clinical data and frailty ph...

Results from 3,263 QuantiFERON-TB Gold in-tube (QFT-GIT) assays were analyzed to determine the impact of age on test performance. The proportion of indeterminate results was significantly higher in pediatric and elderly (9.1% and 7.4%, respectively) than in adult (2.6%; chi-square test, P < 0.0001) patients. A detailed analysis of indeterminate QFT-GIT assay results is presented.

1Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan 704, Taiwan 2Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, National Cheng Kung University Hospital, Tainan 704, Taiwan 3Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 Selangor, Malaysia 4Department of Occupational Medicine, Chi-Mei Medical Center, Tainan 7...

A variety of statistical methods can be used in small-area analysis to test whether there is more variation than would be expected by chance alone. However, the power of these methods to detect existing variation has never been studied. The authors used data regarding back surgery in Washington State to suggest several types of variation that might exist (alternative hypotheses), and then used ...

Brazilian immigrants comprise the third largest ethnic group within the Japanese population. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to determine the factors associated with the prevalence of dental caries in Brazilian schoolchildren living in Japan. A total of 378 schoolchildren, aged between 6 and 14 years, attending Brazilian schools in Japan were included. Clinical data were collected acc...

OBJECTIVES The present study aims at evaluating the decentralisation of the leprosy control activities in the municipality of Betim, Minas Gerais, Brazil. DESIGN A quantitative study was undertaken using data from SINAN (Sistema Nacional de Agravos de Notificação) and patient records. The study included 435 new cases registered and living in Betim. The pre (1995-2000) and post (2001-2005) dec...

Estimation of allelic and genotypic distributions for continuous data using kernel density estimation is discussed and illustrated for some variable number of tandem repeat data. These kernel density estimates provide a useful representation of data when only some of the many variants at a locus are present in a sample. Two Hardy-Weinberg test procedures are introduced for continuous data: a co...

OBJECTIVE The prevalence of physical inactivity amongst adults has been increasing worldwide; however, few studies have been conducted on university freshmen. The present investigation was aimed at determining the prevalence of physical inactivity amongst Brazilian university freshmen and its association with sociodemographic variables. METHODS The database for the research project entitled, ...

Among two flavanones [YS01, YS02] and eight prenylflavanones [YS03-YS10], preliminary screening with fifteen test bacterial strains showed that YS06 was the most active agent. YS06 exhibited highly significant antimicrobial action when tested against 228 bacterial strains comprising two Gram-positive and six Gram-negative genera. The in vitro susceptibility test was carried out by determining t...