BACKGROUND Damp building-related respiratory illnesses are an important public health issue. OBJECTIVE We compared three respiratory case groups defined by questionnaire responses [200 respiratory cases, 123 of the respiratory cases who met the epidemiologic asthma definition, and 49 of the epidemiologic asthma cases who had current physician-diagnosed asthma with post-occupancy onset] to a c...

To guide the collection of data under emergent epidemic conditions, we reviewed compartmental models of historical Ebola outbreaks to determine their implications and limitations. We identified future modeling directions and propose that the minimal epidemiologic dataset for Ebola model construction comprises duration of incubation period and symptomatic period, distribution of secondary cases ...

Viruses are increasingly being recognized as important factors in the pathogenesis of acute and chronic mental illness. Here we review clinical and epidemiologic data concerning viral infection and mental illness, as well as animal models that provide insight into the myriad of mechanisms by which infection can cause brain dysfunction.

Recent years have witnessed a considerable increase in the development and use of mathematical and computer-based models in infectious disease epidemiology. As a measure of this increase, Bailey (1) finds that the literature in this field has grown at a greater-than-exponential rate over the past two decades/ilthough one may suspect that some of the published models have greater value as exerci...

conclusions the identification of the beneficial cardiovascular effects of dhea (s) and a better understanding of the involved mechanisms should be helpful to develop new strategies or pharmacologic approaches for many lethal diseases in western countries. context dehydroepiandrosterone (dhea) and its sulfate ester, dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (dhea-s) have been considered as putative anti-a...

The weighted kappa statistic has been used as an agreement index for ordinal data. Using data on the comparability of primary and proxy respondent reports of alcohol drinking frequency we show that the value of weighted kappa can be sensitive to the choice of weights. The distinction between association and agreement is clarified and it is shown that in some respects weighted kappa behaves more...

background : the high incidence of breast cancer in young women in iran and its resultant problems for families show the necessity of exploring studies conducted in this field. the present research was conducted to determine the volume of scientific production on breast cancer in iran, and to compare it with that of other countries in the middle east. methods : this systematic review study used...

a number of epidemiologic studies have reported a positive relationship between heart rate, cardiovascular disease and mortality. to examine the correlation between heart rate and mortality after acute myocardial infarction (ami), 2147 patients hospitalized in coronary care units in isfahan were investigated in a cross-sectional study. their heart rate was measured according to an electrocardio...