purpose: to compare the effects of short-tem and long-term systemic corticosteroids in the treatment of confirmed ocular toxoplasmosis. methods: this randomized comparative clinical trial was performed on 69 patients with confirmed active ocular toxoplasmosis with typical clinical manifestations. the subjects were randomly assigned to receive either 10 days (group a, 33 cases) or 4-6 weeks (gro...

BACKGROUND Health care systems that succeed in preventing long term care and hospital admissions of frail older people may substantially save on their public spending. The key might be found in high-quality care in the community. Quality Indicators (QIs) of a sufficient methodological level are a prerequisite to monitor, compare, and improve care quality. This systematic review identified exist...

Dengue is a rapidly growing public health threat with approximately 2.5 billion people estimated to be at risk. Several vaccine candidates are at various stages of pre-clinical and clinical development. Thus far, live dengue vaccine candidates have been administered to several thousands of volunteers and were well-tolerated, with minimal short-term safety effects reported in Phase I and Phase I...

This commentary reflects on the articles in this Special Issue. The appearance of this group of articles underscores the important idea that a major target of mindfulness practice is on emotion. Transformation in trait affect is a key goal of all contemplative traditions. This commentary addresses several key methodological and conceptual issues in the empirical study of mindfulness. The many w...

Currently, the quantitative analysis of moderators affecting the function of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA)-axis in health and sickness is still unreliable. This is, in particular, due to physiological factors such as pulsatile ultradian and circadian glucocorticoid secretion as well as to methodological limitations of the current techniques for steroid hormone determination. Based on...

The emergence of practice-based research networks (PBRN) has facilitated the execution of multifaceted community-based studies. As study complexity increases, so does the number of methodological barriers encountered. This paper's goal was to delineate methodological barriers and to evaluate the effectiveness of selected strategies and approaches developed and implemented in allowing a prospect...

Background & aim: This systematic overview of reviews on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) was performed to summarize the clinical efficacy of this approach in the treatment of erectile dysfunction (ED) and assess methodological quality of the included reviews. Methods: A comprehensive search was performed to find the systematic reviews and meta-analyses on CAM interventions (e.g., a...

OBJECTIVE To provide a systematic review of the existing literature on health consequences of vaporing of electronic cigarettes (ECs). METHODS Search in: PubMed, EMBASE and CINAHL. INCLUSION CRITERIA Original publications describing a health-related topic, published before 14 August 2014. PRISMA recommendations were followed. We identified 1101 studies; 271 relevant after screening; 94 elig...

International comparative studies constitute a highly valuable contribution to public policy research. Analysing different policy designs offers not only a mean of knowing the phenomenon itself but also gives us insightful clues on how to improve existing practices. Although much of the work carried out in this realm relies on quantitative appraisal of the data contained in international databa...