BACKGROUND The purpose of this study is to evaluate the validity and reliability of a Persian translation of the Modifiable Activity Questionnaire (MAQ) in a sample of adults from Tehran, Iran. METHODS There were 48 adults (53.1% males) enrolled to test the physical activity questionnaire. A sub-sample included 33 participants (45.5% males) who assessed the reliability of the physical activit...

BACKGROUND A major concern of physicians treating pain patients with chronic opioid therapy and similar drugs is determining whether the patients are also using illicit drugs. This is commonly determined by urine drug testing (UDT). However, there are few studies on whether or not monitoring patients by this technique decreases illicit drug use. OBJECTIVE To determine if the presence of illic...

BACKGROUND High C-reactive protein (CRP) levels are associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular events, even in apparently healthy individuals. It has not been established whether elevated CRP reflects an increased burden of subclinical coronary atherosclerosis. METHODS AND RESULTS We studied a stratified random sample of 321 men and women (mean age 60 years) from the Framingham Heart...

The measurement of colocalization requires images of two fluorophores that are aligned, with no cross talk, and that the intensities remain within the response range of the microscope. Quantitation depends upon differentiating between the presence and absence of fluorescence, and measurements should be made within biologically relevant regions of interest. Co-occurrence can be measured simply b...

This paper addresses the problem of ranking a list of paraphrases associated with a noun-noun compound as closely as possible to human raters (Butnariu et al., 2010). UCD-Goggle tackles this task using semantic knowledge learnt from the Google n-grams together with human-preferences for paraphrases mined from training data. Empirical evaluation shows that UCDGoggle achieves 0.432 Spearman corre...

Methods HIV-infected subjects followed at the Infectious Disease Department of IRCCS San Raffaele, with at least one PTH plasma value and a contemporary CVR determination. CVR was calculated according to Framingham 10years equation (Anderson et al.) Cochran-Armitage test for trend and Spearman correlation were calculated at univariate analysis. Logistic regression was applied at multivariable a...

PURPOSE To perform a clinical characterization of Stargardt patients with ABCA4 gene mutation, and to investigate the correlation between the inner and outer segment (IS/OS) junction morphology and visual acuity, fundus lesions, electroretinogram abnormalities, and macular sensitivity. METHODS Sixty-one patients with Stargardt disease (STGD) were given a comprehensive ophthalmic examination. ...

PURPOSE To validate the Quality of Erection Questionnaire (QEQ) considering Brazilian social-cultural aspects. MATERIALS AND METHODS To determine equivalence between the Portuguese and the English QEQ versions, the Portuguese version was back-translated by two professors who are native English speakers. After language equivalence had been determined, urologists considered the QEQ Portuguese v...

In this tutorial article, the concepts of correlation and regression are reviewed and demonstrated. The authors review and compare two correlation coefficients, the Pearson correlation coefficient and the Spearman rho, for measuring linear and nonlinear relationships between two continuous variables. In the case of measuring the linear relationship between a predictor and an outcome variable, s...

PURPOSE To analyze the response to anti vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) treatment for exudative age-related macular degeneration (AMD), with respect to changes in the Preferential Hyperacuity Perimeter (PHP), best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), and spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT), and to investigate whether the PHP score predicts the need for reinjection. METH...