OBJECTIVE To establish consensus recommendations among health care specialties for defining and establishing diagnostic criteria for the minimally conscious state (MCS). BACKGROUND There is a subgroup of patients with severe alteration in consciousness who do not meet diagnostic criteria for coma or the vegetative state (VS). These patients demonstrate inconsistent but discernible evidence of...

The extent of implementation in daily clinical practice of the new definition of myocardial infarction is unknown. The purpose of the present study was to describe the use of the new definition in patients discharged from a cardiology department. We analyzed the clinical records of 277 patients admitted because of acute coronary syndromes and discharged from the cardiology department between 1 ...

A common problem of interest within a randomized clinical trial is the evaluation of an inexpensive response endpoint as a valid surrogate endpoint for a clinical endpoint, where a chief purpose of a valid surrogate is to provide a way to make correct inferences on clinical treatment effects in future studies without needing to collect the clinical endpoint data. Within the principal stratifica...

OBJECTIVE The quality of documentation of signs and symptoms and validation of the diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) according to case definition criteria of Manning, Rome I and Rome II in an office setting has not been previously described. We sought to identify and validate cases of IBS based on the Manning, Rome I and Rome II diagnostic criteria in a rural practice setting. SETTI...

OBJECTIVE Although recurrent vulvovaginal candidiasis is defined as 4 or more discrete attacks of vulvovaginal candidiasis per year, there is no diagnostic nomenclature or definition for the many women who are chronically symptomatic. This study aims to establish and propose a definition and a set of diagnostic criteria, which would enable clinicians to promptly identify and treat women with ch...