Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are increasingly popular in the social sciences, not only in medicine. We argue that the lay public, and sometimes researchers, put too much trust in RCTs over other methods of investigation. Contrary to frequent claims in the applied literature, randomization does not equalize everything other than the treatment in the treatment and control groups, it does n...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES A wide body of research suggests that the nature of communication between patients and physicians is strongly related to health outcomes. Interventions that involve teaching patients to communicate with physicians are important to assess in this context. METHODS We conducted a review of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in the outpatient setting from 1975 to 2000. ...

Although the efficacy of tumor necrosis factor (TNF) antagonists for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has been established in randomized controlled trials (RCTs), safety concerns have emerged, particularly with regard to risk of infection, malignancy, and cardiovascular (CV) outcomes. Because of the shorter duration and limited number of patients enrolled in RCTs, evidence regarding t...

A systematic search was performed to identify active, externally funded randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that target suicidal ideation or behavior as a primary or secondary outcome among U.S. military service members, guard-reservists, and veterans. Twenty-three studies were identified, most funded by the U.S. Department of Defense or U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Several innovations ...

BACKGROUND Very elderly subjects (VES; aged 80 years or older) constitute a special population as they frequently present multiple diseases (polypathology). Results from trials on general adult populations therefore cannot be extrapolated to VES. We performed a census of randomized controlled trials (RCT) on VES published between 1990 and 2002, and carried out a descriptive and methodological a...

Characterizations of quasi-continuousmodules and continuousmodules are given. A non-trivial generalization of injectivity (distinct from p-injectivity) is considered.

OBJECTIVES There is often substantial uncertainty about the impacts of health system and policy interventions. Despite that, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are uncommon in this field, partly because experiments can be difficult to carry out. An alternative method for impact evaluation is the interrupted time-series (ITS) design. Little is known, however, about how results from the two meth...

BACKGROUND Self-help interventions without professional contact to curb adult problem drinking in the community are increasingly being delivered via the Internet. OBJECTIVE The objective of this meta-analysis was to assess the overall effectiveness of these eHealth interventions. METHODS In all, 9 randomized controlled trials (RCTs), all from high-income countries, with 9 comparison conditi...

The number needed to treat (NNT) is a popular effect measure to present study results in biomedical research. NNTs were originally proposed to describe the absolute effect of a new treatment compared with a standard treatment or placebo in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with binary outcome. The concept of the NNT measure has been applied to a number of other research areas involving the de...

Axioms of Lie algebroid are discussed. In particular, it is shown that a Lie quasi-algebroid (i.e. a Lie algebra bracket on the C∞(M)-module E of sections of a vector bundle E over a manifold M which satisfies [X, fY ] = f [X, Y ] + A(X,f)Y for all X, Y ∈ E , f ∈ C∞(M), and for certain A(X,f) ∈ C∞(M)) is a Lie algebroid if rank(E) > 1, and is a local Lie algebra in the sense of Kirillov if E is...