Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in arthritis and musculoskeletal conditions generally necessitate longterm follow up of largely self-reported outcomes; thus, such RCTs are prone to missing outcome data, mainly because of participant dropout/non-response. Recent years have seen a rise in the application of methods for dealing with missing outcome data (e.g. mixed models for repeated measures...

PURPOSE This study investigated the long-term efficacy, safety, and compliance associated with sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT) in Korean patients with allergic rhinitis sensitized to house dust mites. METHODS This is a retrospective cohort study. A total of 164 patients who were sensitized to Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus and Dermatophagoides farinae and who received SLIT were enrolled betwe...

In this paper, multivariate skew-normal distribution is em- ployed for analyzing an outcome based dropout model for repeated mea- surements with non-random dropout in skew regression data sets. A probit regression is considered as the conditional probability of an ob- servation to be missing given outcomes. A simulation study of using the proposed methodology and comparing it with a semi-parame...

We introduce Information Dropout, a generalization of dropout that is motivated by the Information Bottleneck principle and highlights the way in which injecting noise in the activations can help in learning optimal representations of the data. Information Dropout is rooted in information theoretic principles, it includes as special cases several existing dropout methods, like Gaussian Dropout ...

BACKGROUND In Luxembourg, the extensive phenomenon of school dropout is a prime policy concern in the light of individual, social and economic consequences. Although the authorities report an overall decrease of the national dropout rate, the proportion of early school leavers who remain without any specific occupation is still alarming. Therefore, this study intends a shift of focus from syste...

In spite of the advances in pattern recognition technology, Handwritten Bangla Character Recognition (HBCR) (such as alpha-numeric and special characters) remains largely unsolved due to the presence of many perplexing characters and excessive cursive in Bangla handwriting. Even the best existing recognizers do not lead to satisfactory performance for practical applications. To improve the perf...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the association between feelings of countertransference (CT) at the early psychiatric care provided to trauma victims and treatment outcome. METHOD The Assessment of Countertransference Scale was used to access CT after the first medical appointment. Fifty psychiatric residents cared for 131 trauma victims of whom 83% were women, aged 15 to 64 years. Patients had bee...

BACKGROUND Dropout rates in binge eating disorder (BED) treatment are high (17-30%), and predictors of dropout are unknown. METHOD Participants were 376 patients following an intensive outpatient cognitive behavioural therapy programme for BED, 82 of whom (21.8%) dropped out of treatment. An exploratory logistic regression was performed using eating disorder variables, general psychopathology...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on comparing background characteristics, self-efficacy, and family support of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and of veteran Israelis who join therapeutic communities in Israel, and their adjustment to these communities. The aim of this research was to examine whether therapeutic communities are an appropriate rehabilitative setting ...

OBJECTIVE Chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a serious health problem in Taiwan. The high dropout rate due to side effects limits the efficacy of treatment. The objective of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of telecare for the treatment of chronic hepatitis. MATERIAL AND METHODS Two hundred and ninety-eight patients randomly chose either of the two support programs. Gr...