BACKGROUND Pharmacological treatment of tinnitus cannot be considered well established. Thus, reducing tinnitus severity through behavioral therapy is emerging as a key goal. METHODS A total of 286 patients suffering from persistent and stable tinnitus for four months or longer participated in this controlled clinical multicenter study. The study investigated the efficacy and safety of a stan...

Postoperative monitoring of pain and distress in small rodents is not standardized, and widely accepted score sheets are not available. Here we describe a score sheet used in abdominal surgery of rodents, with particular reference to procedures involving the liver.

Objectives The aim of this study was to compare the discriminatory power of two prognostic scores, SAPS 3 and APACHE II, in surgical patients. Methods Retrospectively collected data from all surgical patients admitted to a Brazilian hospital ICU between January 2011 and December 2013 were analyzed. The standardized mortality ratio (SMR) was computed for mortality prediction. The predictive abil...

BACKGROUND Information on tumor stage and grade are used to assess cancer prognosis and to produce standardized comparisons of end results over time. Changes in the interpretation of classification schemes can alter the apparent distribution of cancer stage or grade in the absence of a true biologic change. Since the introduction of prostate-specific antigen testing, the reported incidence of l...

Cognitive Tutors are primarily developed as instructional systems, with the goal of helping students learn. However, the systems are inherently also data collection and assessment systems. In this paper, we analyze data from over 3,000 students in a school district using Carnegie Learning’s Middle School Mathematics tutors and model performance on standardized tests. Combining a standardized pr...

BACKGROUND The disabilities of the arm, shoulder and hand (DASH) questionnaire is a self-administered region-specific outcome instrument developed as a measure of self-rated upper-extremity disability and symptoms. The DASH consists mainly of a 30-item disability/symptom scale, scored 0 (no disability) to 100. The main purpose of this study was to assess the longitudinal construct validity of t...

INTRODUCTION One of the top research priorities in acute kidney injury is related to the timing of renal replacement therapy (RRT) initiation. The purpose was to develop an index that might serve as a standardized concept of timing of initiation of RRT. METHODS A previously described database was used. We applied a multivariable Cox regression model with backward selection to characterize par...

The evaluation of individual cognitive change has relied heavily upon the raw change score, defined simply as the difference between follow-up and baseline scores. However, raw changes scores are susceptible to the confounding effects of both regression-to-the-mean and practice effect. The clinical relevance of raw change scores for the older adult is also obscured by normal, age-related cognit...

Three major techniques for statistically handling LIV are reviewed: (1) regression analysis as proposed by Lacey (ALS); (2) the difference between standardized preand poststimulus scores as proposed by Heath and Oken,and (3) the intuitively appealing per cent change transformations. The proposed criterion of a satisfactory score is: The correlation between the initial level and a properly corre...