The widespread adoption of electronic medical records means there are now vast data resources available for comparative effectiveness research (CER). In concert with conventional randomized controlled trials, CER holds great promise for advancing our understanding of how different therapeutic treatments yield different health outcomes in different settings and with different populations. But in...

This chapter addresses strategies for selecting variables for adjustment in nonexperimental comparative effectiveness research (CER), and uses causal graphs to illustrate the causal network relating treatment to outcome. While selection approaches should be based on an understanding of the causal network representing the common cause pathways between treatment and outcome, the true causal netwo...

There is an increasing amount of clinical data in operational electronic health record (EHR) systems. Such data provide substantial opportunities for their re-use for many purposes, including comparative effectiveness research (CER). In a previous paper, we identified a number of caveats related to the use of such data, noting that they may be inaccurate, incomplete, transformed in ways that un...

Treatment effects, especially when comparing two or more therapeutic alternatives as in comparative effectiveness research, are likely to be heterogeneous across age, gender, co-morbidities and co-medications. Propensity scores (PSs), an alternative to multivariable outcome models to control for measured confounding, have specific advantages in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects. I...

Organophosphate (OP) compounds are frequently used agorchemicals for deliberate self-harm in some parts of the world resulting in high mortality and morbidity. Pralidoxime (2PAM) is the most widely used and trialed oxime for treatment of OP poisoning. There have been variations over the results of trials using 2PAM for OP poisoning. 2PAM therapy has led to favorable outcomes in some studies, wh...

although the use of metaphorical markers in corpora has been studied to a largeextent (e.g., glucksberg & keysar 1993; skorczynska & deignan, 2006; sznjder,2005), no attempt to the best of the researchers' knowledge has been made todescribe metaphorical marking in a comparative analysis of 2 corpora in bothnational and international journals of applied linguistics in iran. the gap envis...