BACKGROUND The Derriford Appearance Scale 59 (DAS59) is a widely used measure of the spectrum of psychological distress and dysfunction that is characteristic of disfigurement. Also, disfigurement due to burn injury leads to feeling guilty or less socially competent, avoiding social situations, suicide, poor self-esteem, sexual difficulties, and depression. Therefore, the purpose of this study ...

SF-36 is a measure of non-condition-specific health status that was originally designed to assess the patient’s subjective efficacy of interventions. Although SF-36 has been in use for nearly 20 years, its utility as a predictor for cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk has received little attention. In this issue, Myint et al. used SF-36 to assess the relationship between ‘physical functional heal...

BACKGROUND Osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic-degenerative disease. The knee is the most commonly affected joint and the symptoms are generally attributed to quadriceps muscle weakness. However, few studies have evaluated this relationship in a population with early stages of knee OA. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether a correlation among the knee extensor torque and the three subscales of the WO...

OBJECTIVE Social withdrawal is described as the condition in which an individual experiences a desire to make social contact, but is unable to satisfy that desire. It is an important issue for patients with motor neurone disease who are likely to experience severe physical impairment. This study aims to reassess the psychometric and scaling properties of the MND Social Withdrawal Scale (MND-SWS...

Methods Fifty-nine patients with rTOF (median age 28 years, range 15-69) underwent cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) from 2008-2009 and completed the Short Form 36 (a validated quality of life assessment). A midventricular short-axis slice was analyzed for left ventricular global circumferential strain (LVGCS) with feature tracking software (TomTec, Unterschleissheim, Germany). A four-cha...

BACKGROUND This study was conducted to establish the minimal detectable change (MDC) and clinically important differences (CIDs) of the physical category of the Stroke-Specific Quality of Life Scale in patients with stroke. METHODS MDC and CIDs scores were calculated from the data of 74 participants enrolled in randomized controlled trials investigating the effects of two rehabilitation progr...