OBJECTIVE The prognostic role of survivin in colorectal carcinoma remains controversial. This meta-analysis aimed to explore the association between survivin expression and survival outcomes in patients with colorectal carcinoma. METHODS A comprehensive literature search for relevant studies published up to April 2013 was performed using PubMed, MEDLINE and ISI Web of Science. Only articles i...

Background: In traditional medicine and recent years, nerve stimulation has been introduced as a replacement therapy for managing several disorders such as overactive bladder. However, there is still controversy in this regard. Therefore, the present meta-analysis aimed to assess the effectiveness of electrical nerve stimulation in treatment of overactive bladder.Methods: The present systematic...

Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) is a numeric index that is of great importance in measuring productivity and its changes. In recent years, tools like DEA have been utilized for determining MPI. In the present paper, some models are recommended for calculating MPI when there are just ratio data available. Then, using DEA and DEA-R, some models are proposed under the constant returns to scale ...

BACKGROUND Outcomes collected in randomized clinical trials are observations of random variables that should be independent and identically distributed. However, in some trials, the patients are randomized more than once thus violating both of these assumptions. The probability of an event is not always the same when a patient is re-randomized; there is probably a non-zero covariance coming fro...

BACKGROUND Several chronic inflammatory disorders, such as rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus, have been shown to increase venous thromboembolism (VTE) risk but the data on psoriasis is unclear. METHODS We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies that reported odds ratio, relative risk, hazard ratio or standardized incidence ratio comparing V...

recent tendencies in concrete technology have been towards to high- performance concrete with a low water-cement ratio. however, high performance concretes have some problems. one of the problems is early-age cracking due to autogenous shrinkage. this study presents the results of an experimental investigation carried out to evaluate the autogenous shrinkage of high-strength concrete. accordin...

the present meta-analysis was conducted to provide a quantitative measure of the overall effects of task complexity on chinese efl learners’ language production. based on the strict inclusion criteria, 12 primary studies were synthesized according to key features. eleven of them were meta-analyzed to investigate effects of raising the resource-directing task complexity. results revealed that ...

smoking has become more prevalent in turkey than it has in those of western countries during the past decade. this study was conducted to make parameter estimations on gender related smoking habits with the minimum of variance. of the ninety-two researches related to smoking habits conducted from 1981 to 2003 in turkey, 60 were deemed appropriate for the application of meta analysis and meta re...

BACKGROUND Description of the anatomical severity of injuries in trauma patients is important. While the Injury Severity Score has been regarded as the "gold standard" since its creation, several studies have indicated that the New Injury Severity Score is better. Therefore, we aimed to systematically evaluate and compare the accuracy of the Injury Severity Score and the New Injury Severity Sco...

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES The objectives of this study were to analyze the association between two genetic variants (rs2200733 and rs7193343) in a Spanish population and the risk of developing atrial fibrillation, and to carry out a systematic review and meta-analysis of these associations. METHODS We performed a case-control study involving 257 case patients with atrial fibrillation and 37...