Interferon (IFN)-α therapy for chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is frequently associated with major depressive episodes. Bupropion, a commonly used antidepressant agent, has recently found to have strong anti-inflammatory effects in animal models. Despite of the theoretical relevancy, the antidepressant effect of bupropion in IFN-alpha-induced depression has never been studied. Ten HCV...

Data extraction Data were extracted on diagnostic criteria, presence or absence of antidepressant medication, method of randomisation and study design features, outcome measurement, blinding, and adverse effects. Main results 5 trials were included (151 patients). All trials included patients who met DSM-III-R or DSM-IV criteria for a major depressive episode. In all 5 trials, placebo treatment...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the inter-rater agreement of personality disorders in clinical settings. METHODS Clinicians rated 75 patients with substance use disorders on the DSM-IV criteria of personality disorders in random order, and on rating scales representing the severity of each. RESULTS Convergent validity agreement was moderate (range for r = 0.55, 0.67) for cluster B disorder...

The increasing popularity of open innovation approaches has led to the rise of various open innovation communities on the Internet which might contain several thousand user-generated ideas. However, a company’s absorptive capacity is limited regarding such an amount of ideas so that there is a strong need for mechanisms supporting the evaluation of these ideas. In this paper, we focus on the ev...

The increase in the number of companies seeking data warehousing solutions, in order to gain significant business advantages, has created the need for a decision-aid approach in choosing appropriate data warehouse (DW) systems. Owing to the vague concepts frequently represented in decision environments, we have proposed a fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making procedure, to facilitate data wareho...

Three hand-grenade design factors, namely shape (ball, oval, can), diameter (55, 60, and 65 mm) and weight (300, 400, and 500 g), were assessed. The objective criteria were (1) throwing distance from the grenade stop point to throwing point, and (2) error distance from the grenade stop point to the target. The subjective criteria were (3) the overall rating of handling (to hold and control) pro...

Most recommendation systems require some form of user feedback such as ratings in order to make personalized propositions of items. Typically ratings are unidimensional in the sense of consisting of a scalar value that represents the user’s appreciation for the rated item. Multi-criteria ratings allow users to express more differentiated opinions by allowing separate ratings for different aspec...

OBJECTIVE To find and assess quality-rating instruments that can be used by health care consumers to assess websites displaying health information. DATA SOURCES Searches of PubMed, the World Wide Web (using five different search engines), reference tracing from identified articles, and a review of the of the American Medical Informatics Association's annual symposium proceedings. REVIEW MET...

BACKGROUND The Levels of Evidence Rating System is widely believed to categorize studies by quality, with Level I studies representing the highest quality evidence. We aimed to determine the reporting quality of Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) published in the most frequently cited general orthopaedic journals. METHODS Two assessors identified orthopaedic journals that reported a level of...

ACR Appropriateness Criteria 1 Rib Fractures American College of Radiology ACR Appropriateness Criteria Clinical Condition: Rib Fractures Variant 1: Adult. Suspected rib fractures from minor blunt trauma (injury confined to ribs). Radiologic Procedure Rating Comments RRL* X-ray chest 8 Obtain PA view. ☢ X-ray rib views 5 ☢ ☢ ☢ CT chest without contrast 3 ☢ ☢ ☢ Tc-99m bone scan whole body 2 ☢ ☢ ...