OBJECTIVE To develop a physical activity questionnaire aimed at Brazilian adolescents and to assess its validity and reproducibility. METHODS A total of 94 adolescents (30 males and 64 females) aged 11-16 years were included in the study, which was conducted in 2004. The questionnaire comprised 17 questions on habitual physical activity in the last 12 months (15 questions on sports and physic...

PURPOSE Biomarkers and genomic signatures represent potentially predictive tools for precision medicine. Validation of predictive biomarkers in prospective or retrospective studies requires statistical justification of power and sample size. However, the design of these studies is complex and the statistical methods and associated software are limited, especially in survival data. Herein, we ad...

MOTIVATION To predict which of the vast number of human single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are deleterious to gene function or likely to be disease associated is an important problem, and many methods have been reported in the literature. All methods require data sets of mutations classified as 'deleterious' or 'neutral' for training and/or validation. While different workers have used diff...

OBJECTIVE To develop a tool for assessing the performance of primary care services in South Korea from the patient's perspective and to test the validity of the tool under the conceptual framework of the recently developed definition of primary care in Korea. DESIGN Item development for questionnaire and a cross-sectional survey for tool validation at 16 primary care clinics. All family physi...

An important consideration in health service delivery is ensuring that services meet consumer needs. Whilst nursing services in primary care have grown internationally, there has been limited exploration of consumer satisfaction with these services. This paper reports a descriptive survey that sought to evaluate consumers' perceptions of New Zealand practice nurses (PNs). One thousand, five hun...

The recent identification of a common genetic variant (LRRK2 G2385R) which is associated with a two-fold increased risk of sporadic Parkinson's Disease (PD) in two independent Chinese populations in Singapore and Taiwan has generated considerable excitement. Thus far, this variant appears specific for the Asian population, emphasising further that ethnic-specific effects should be considered in...

A growing interest in the functional importance of dispositional autonomy led to the development and validation of the Index of Autonomous Functioning (IAF) across seven studies. The IAF provides a measure of trait autonomy based on three theoretically derived subscales assessing authorship/self-congruence, interest-taking, and low susceptibility to control. Results showed consistency within an...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate a brief version of the Alcohol Expectancy Questionnaire-Adolescent (AEQ-A; Brown, Christiansen, & Goldman, 1987). The original AEQ-A was reduced to seven items (called the AEQ-AB). Principal Components Analysis (PCA) was performed and two factors emerged (General Positive Effects and Potential Negative Effects) accounting for 46% of the variance. Intern...

Metabolomics is the field of "-omics" research concerned with the comprehensive characterization of the small low-molecular-weight metabolites in biological samples. In epidemiology, it represents an emerging technology and an unprecedented opportunity to measure environmental and other exposures with improved precision and far less measurement error than with standard epidemiologic methods. Ad...

BACKGROUND the Falls Efficacy Scale-International (FES-I) is a widely used measure of fear of falling that assesses concerns with respect to falls over a range of physical and social activities. In the original validation study, the methods used (self-selection by participants) were likely to over-represent those with a higher educational level and socio-economic grouping. In addition, the fact...