background: although lebanon is a highly polluted country, so far no study has specifically been designed to assess the association between outdoor air pollution and chronic bronchitis in this country. objective: to assess the association between exposure to outdoor air pollution and chronic bronchitis in lebanon. methods: a pilot case-control study was conducted in two tertiary care hospitals....

background: considering the negative consequences of using physical restraints, we conducted this study to identify patients who are more frequently restrained in a psychiatric emergency ward as an initial step to limit the use of restraint to the minimum possible. methods: this was a retrospective case control study conducted in iran psychiatric hospital in tehran, iran. we reviewed the files ...

background: the novel influenza a (h1n1) virus was first detected in march 2009 in mexico and then disseminated to many other countries worldwide. in this study, we assessed the potential risk factors of swine flu as well as the most important clinical manifestations of this infectious disease among confirmed cases during early phase of pandemic h1n1. methods: subjects (cases and controls) were...

Research on shallow processing suggests that readers sometimes encode only a superficial representation of a text and fail to make use of all available information. Greene, McKoon, and Ratcliff (1992) extended this work to pronouns, finding evidence that readers sometimes fail to automatically identify referents even when these are unambiguous. In this paper we revisit those findings. In 11 rec...

BACKGROUND Case-control studies are a common and efficient means of studying rare diseases or illnesses with long latency periods. Matching of cases and controls is frequently employed to control the effects of known potential confounding variables. The analysis of matched data requires specific statistical methods. METHODS The objective of this study was to determine the proportion of publis...

In epidemiological studies one is interested in investigating the probability of disease depending on risk factors and in particular in detecting interactions of risk factors. Within the setting of parametric logistic regression interactions can be modeled only in a clumsy and limited way. Modeling the risk function nonparametrically, estimating it e.g. by a smoothing (thin plate) spline is att...