BACKGROUND To test the ease of use, reliability, responsiveness and construct validity of the Patient Generated Index, an individualised quality of life score, in older people attending a Medicine for Older People Day Hospital. METHODS Prospective longitudinal study in patients attending a specialist Medicine for Older People Day Hospital in Scotland. The Patient Generated Index was administe...

background: many countries make many of their governmental sectors private. this transition, however, may affect their employees in numerous ways. objective: to determine the level of occupational stress and mental health of employees of a petrochemical company in isfahan, central iran, before and 3 months after privatization. methods: out of the 700 employees of the studied company, using a st...

There is growing interest in the use of dietary patterns as measures of exposure in studies of diet-disease relationships. However, relatively little is known about the impact of the type of dietary assessment method on the patterns observed. Using FFQ and food diary data collected from 585 women in early pregnancy we used principal component analysis to define dietary patterns. The first patte...

BACKGROUND Diarrhea is a leading cause of morbidity among children under 5 years of age in low- and middle-income countries yet the additional effects and sequelae, such as cognitive impairment associated with diarrhea, have not been quantified. METHODS We quantified the association between diarrhea prevalence and cognitive outcomes while controlling for linear growth in 4 study populations. ...

This study aimed to devise a method for prioritizing hazardous chemicals for further regulatory action. To accomplish this objective, we chose appropriate indicators and algorithms. Nine indicators from the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals were used to identify categories to which the authors assigned numerical scores. Exposure indicators included handling ...

As the need of quality assessment increases day by day. Here develops an efficient general-purpose blind image/video quality assessment (I/VQA) algorithm using a natural scene statistics (NSS) model of discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients. The image/video quality assessment approach relies on a simple Bayesian inference model to predict image/video quality scores from certain extracted ...

OBJECTIVE To provide an overview of the household dietary diversity score and the food consumption score, two indicators used for food security assessment and surveillance, and compare their performance in food security assessments in three countries. DESIGN Cross-sectional cluster sampling design using an interview-administered structured questionnaire on household food security, including h...

BACKGROUND The Walter Reed Visual Assessment Scale (WRVAS) was designed to allow idiopathic scoliosis patients to describe their perception of their deformity. In a previous stduy, the scale has shown good correlation with magnitude of the curve METHODS The study included 70 patients (60 women and 10 men), mean age 19.4 years (range 12-40), with idiopathic scoliosis. Each patient filled out t...

Semiparametric models are often considered for analyzing longitudinal data for a good balance between flexibility and parsimony. In this paper, we study a class of marginal partially linear quantile models with possibly varying coefficients. The functional coefficients are estimated by basis function approximations. The estimation procedure is easy to implement, and it requires no specification...