There is currently much debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid and about what kind of projects can engender economic development. There is skepticism about the ability of econometric analysis to resolve these issues, or of development agencies to learn from their own experience. In response, there is movement in development economics towards the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs)...

Conventional treatment for primary dysmenorrhoea has a failure rate of 20% to 25% and may be contraindicated or not tolerated by some women. Herbal medicine may be a suitable alternative. The objective of the manuscript, is determine the efficacy and safety of some Iranian herbal medicine for primary dysmenorrhea when compared with placebo, no treatment, and other treatment. For this target ele...

OBJECTIVES To explore the effectiveness of data sharing by randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in journals with a full data sharing policy and to describe potential difficulties encountered in the process of performing reanalyses of the primary outcomes. DESIGN Survey of published RCTs. SETTING PubMed/Medline. ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA RCTs that had been submitted and published by The BMJ and ...

OBJECTIVE To conduct a systematic review of the research evaluating the effect of psychological interventions for pediatric feeding problems. METHODS A search was conducted to identify studies using psychological interventions for pediatric feeding problems published between 1998 and 2013. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and nonrandomized studies that examined aggregated outcome data were...

AIM To assess the risk of bias (RoB) in a subset of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published in orthodontic journals using the Cochrane RoB tool and to identify associations between domain RoB assessment and treatment effect estimates. MATERIALS AND METHODS Fifty consecutive issues of four major orthodontic journals were electronically searched to identify RCTs. The quality of the includ...

Nutrition is crucial to the initial development of the central nervous system (CNS), and then to its maintenance, because both depend on dietary intake to supply the elements required to develop and fuel the system. Diet in early life is often seen in the context of "programming" where a stimulus occurring during a vulnerable period can have long-lasting or even lifetime effects on some aspect ...

M e t h o d s Data sources: MEDLINE (to February 2007) and bibliographies of relevant reviews. Study selection and assessment: Englishor Spanish-language studies evaluating triple or quadruple therapies for eradicating H. pylori in patients who were either all sensitive or all resistant to CTM or NTM. Studies had to include ≥ 4 patients per treatment group with H. pylori infection at baseline. ...

In this supplementary material, we give the detailed proofs of some lemmas, properties and theorems, as well as some additional experimental results on synthetic data and four recommendation system data sets. A More Notations R n denotes the n-dimensional Euclidean space, and the set of all m×n matrices with real entries is denoted by R m×n. Given matrices X and Y ∈ R m×n , the inner product is...

Classifiers are overt linguistic categorisation devices and ‚a unique window‛ into human cognition (Lakoff, 1986). English is traditionally regarded as a non-classifier language, but a closer look shows that English also possesses classifier-like words, called ‘Quasi-Classifiers’/QCLs. This paper focuses on the cognitive categorisation process underlying English QCL usage, and takes the two-dim...

CONTEXT Ongoing efforts to improve the quality of reporting for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) include the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) statement. We examined the frequency of explicit reporting of the number needed to treat (NNT) and the absolute risk reduction (ARR) in RCTs. METHODS Five frequently cited journals were investigated: Annals of Internal Medicine, B...