The logic of a new design for empirical clinical practice, the repeated pretest-posttest experiment, is described. This design is readily applicable by individual practitioners in the human services, possesses high internal validity, and presents minimal intrusiveness into the delivery of service. A single-case study is used to illustrate the application of the repeated pretest-posttest experim...

Moderately accurate, depending on which tool you use. Questionnaires, physical examination, and clinical prediction rules estimate the pretest probability of obstructive sleep apnea hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS), but are not specific enough to make the diagnosis. The Epworth Sleepiness Scale is a reliable measure of daytime sleepiness. The Berlin Questionnaire, Mallampati score, and truncal obesity...

A pretest procedure consists of a preliminary test on a nuisance parameter, investigating whether it equals a given value or not, followed by the main testing problem on the parameter of interest. In case of acceptance of the preliminary test, the main test is applied in the restricted family with the given value of the nuisance parameter, while otherwise the test is performed in the complete f...

Item parameter calibration is important for tests based on item response theory, because the scoring, equating, bias analysis of the test, and item selection in adaptive tests are all based on the item parameters. As a test is continuously administered, item calibration needs to be conducted for new items at intervals to replace overexposed, obsolete, or flawed items in the item bank. Although ...

OBJECTIVES We assessed the usefulness of 64-slice computed tomography coronary angiography (CTCA) to detect or rule out coronary artery disease (CAD) in patients with various estimated pretest probabilities of CAD. BACKGROUND The pretest probability of the presence of CAD may impact the diagnostic performance of CTCA. METHODS Sixty-four-slice CTCA (Sensation 64, Siemens, Forchheim, Germany)...

Rodents exposed to a 15-min pretest swim in the forced swimming test (FST) exhibit prolonged immobility in a subsequent 5-min test swim, and antidepressant treatment before the test swim reduces immobility. At present, neuronal circuits recruited by antidepressant before the test swim remain unclear, and also less is known about whether antidepressants with different mechanisms of action could ...

STUDY OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to systematically review the accuracy of the Alvarado score and Pediatric Appendicitis Score and to identify optimal cutoffs for low- and high-risk populations. METHODS We performed a systematic review of the literature and identified 26 studies of the accuracy of the Alvarado score and Pediatric Appendicitis Score. Data were abstracted in parall...

Collaboration is generally an effective means of learning new information, but is collaboration productive in domains where collaborators may hold qualitatively different conceptions of the domain’s causal structure? We explored this question in the domain of evolutionary biology, where previous research has shown that most individuals construe evolution as the uniform transformation of an enti...