PURPOSE To determine the prevalence of premature ejaculation (PE) among adult Asian males presented with lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) and characterize its association with other clinical factors. METHODS A cross-sectional study was conducted at a tertiary medical center to determine the prevalence of PE among adult male participants with LUTS during the Annual National Prostate Health ...

BACKGROUND With the use of highly mobile tools like tablet PCs in clinical settings, an effective disinfection method is a necessity. Since manufacturers do not allow cleaning methods that make use of anything but a dry fleece, other approaches have to be established to ensure patient safety and to minimize risks posed by microbiological contamination. OBJECTIVE The ability of isopropanol wip...

Maternal serum activin A levels are elevated in women with preeclampsia. To explore whether this could be due, at least in part, to increased production by the gestational tissues, we have measured activin A in the serum of women with (n=23) or without preeclampsia (n=62) at 29-40 weeks of gestation and in placenta and fetal membranes from preterm preeclamptic (PT-PE, n=8), term preeclamptic (T...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Continuous assessment of the cerebrovascular autoregulation (CVA) through use of the pressure reactivity index (PRx), a moving linear correlation coefficient between mean arterial blood pressure and intracranial pressure, has been effective in optimizing cerebral perfusion pressure (CPPopt) in traumatic brain injured (TBI) patients. This study investigates the feasibil...

We consider the decision problem of making causal conclusions from observational data. Typically, using standard matched pairs techniques, there is a source of uncertainty that is not usually quantified, namely the uncertainty due to the choice of the experimenter: two different reasonable experimenters can easily have opposite results. In this work we present an alternative to the standard non...

Context: Test-Driven development (TDD) is a software development approach where test cases are written before actual development of the code in iterative cycles. TDD has gained attention of many software practitioners during the last decade since it has suggested several benefits in the software development process. However, empirical evidence of its dominance in terms of internal code quality,...

BACKGROUND The pathophysiology of recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL) is still unknown in 50% of the cases. Herein we measure the expression of beta3 integrin subunit, a well-known implantation marker, in women with or without RPL and correlate it with the histological dating of the endometrial tissue. METHODS LH-timed endometrial biopsies were obtained from cases (RPL; n = 21, age 33.9+/-4.7) and...

BACKGROUND In healthcare research, outcomes with skewed probability distributions are common. Sample size calculations for such outcomes are typically based on estimates on a transformed scale (e.g. log) which may sometimes be difficult to obtain. In contrast, estimates of median and variance on the untransformed scale are generally easier to pre-specify. The aim of this paper is to describe ho...

BACKGROUND Often mental disorders are serious problems concerning psychological well-being. They require comprehensive and specialized psychiatric and psychological help, but there are no public methods of controlling your mental state. The aim of study was the evaluation of the utility of Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale and Barratt Impulsiveness Scale in the diagnosis of social anxiety, impulsi...