INTRODUCTION Systematic reviews are a cornerstone of evidence-based public health. The method of appraising the quality of different intervention and observational study designs in such reviews remains an important challenge. This article examines the applicability of selected quality appraisal tools (QATs) and the impact of choice of tool on the meta-analysis of a published systematic review. ...

OBJECTIVES This study aimed to assess the prevalence of oral mucosal lesions (OMLs) in patients attending outpatient dental clinics in Sana`a university, Yemen, and to evaluate the association of such lesions with age, gender, and oral habits. MATERIALS AND METHODS This cross-sectional study included 409 subjects (272 males, 137 females, age: 15-86 years). Detailed clinical examination was pe...

background: qat (also known as khat , kat and miraa ) is a green-leaved plant ( catha edulis ). it is a shrub indigenous to yemen and certain parts of eastern africa. chewing the leaves, which have sympathomimetic and euphoric effects, has been documented in many countries and increased with worldwide migration. the effect of long-term chewing qat on the oral cavity is unknown. objective: a sys...

Answer ranking is critical to a QA (Question Answering) system because it determines the final system performance. In this paper, we explore the behavior of shallow ranking features under different conditions. The features are easy to implement and are also suitable when complex NLP techniques or resources are not available for monolingual or cross-lingual tasks. We analyze six shallow ranking ...

Twelve patients with aortic insufficiency (AI) were investigated by echocardiographic methods using reflected ultrasound. No patients with associated mitral valvular disease were included. Estimates of each patient's aortic valvular total flow (QAt) as computed from left ventricular cavity minor-axis dimension changes at end-diastole (Dd) and end-systole (D,) were compared with their respective...

Twelve patients with aortic insufficiency (AI) were investigated by echocardiographic methods using reflected ultrasound. No patients with associated mitral valvular disease were included. Estimates of each patient's aortic valvular total flow (QAt) as computed from left ventricular cavity minor-axis dimension changes at end-diastole (Dd) and end-systole (D,) were compared with their respective...

UNLABELLED HEALTH CARE POLICY BACKGROUND: Findings from scientific studies form the basis for evidence-based health policy decisions. SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND Quality assessments to evaluate the credibility of study results are an essential part of health technology assessment reports and systematic reviews. Quality assessment tools (QAT) for assessing the study quality examine to what extent st...

BACKGROUND Recruitment to pragmatic randomised controlled trials (RCTs) is acknowledged to be difficult, and few interventions have proved to be effective. Previous qualitative research has consistently revealed that recruiters provide imbalanced information about RCT treatments. However, qualitative research can be time-consuming to apply. Within a programme of research to optimise recruitment...