The purpose of this study was to adapt the Spitzer Quality of Life Index and evaluate its reliability in patients with low back pain. The following steps were followed: translation, back-translation, evaluation by a committee, and pretest. The reliability was estimated through stability and homogeneity assessment. The validity was tested comparing scores of the Spitzer (QLI) with the SF-36 and ...

Original scientific paper The present study aims to investigate some mechanisms of corporate governance on profit smoothing. In fact, it studies the relationship between institutional investors, outside board members, internal audit and profit smoothing. A hypothesis was formulated for each of these options and their effect on profit smoothing was tested. A regression model was used to test the...

BACKGROUND Rapid growth in global health activity among US medical specialty education programs has lead to heterogeneity in types of activities and global health training models. The breadth and scope of this activity is not well chronicled. METHODS Using a standardized search protocol, we examined the characteristics of US medical residency global health programs by number of programs, clin...

Information searching is the most popular activity in Internet. Usually the search engine provides the search results ranked by the relevance. However, for a certain purpose that concerns with information credibility, particularly citing information for scientific works, another approach of ranking the search engine results is required. This paper presents a study on developing a new ranking me...

Herein, we propose a Spearman rank correlation-based screening procedure for ultrahigh-dimensional data with censored response cases. The proposed method is model-free without specifying any regression forms of predictors or variables and robust under the unknown monotone transformations these variable predictors. sure-screening rank-consistency properties are established some mild regularity c...

INTRODUCTION Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is associated with hypogalactosylation of immunoglobulin G (IgG). We examined whether a proxy measure for galactosylation of IgG N-glycans could predict response to therapy or was differentially affected by methotrexate (MTX) or TNF blockade. METHODS Using a previously defined normal phase high-performance liquid chromatography approach, we ascertained t...

OBJECTIVE To assess the reliability and validity of the Dutch version of the exercise self-efficacy scale (ESES) in persons with spinal cord injury. This is the first independent study of ESES psychometric properties, and the first report on ESES test-retest reliability. SUBJECTS/PATIENTS A total of 53 Dutch persons with spinal cord injury. METHODS Subjects completed the Dutch ESES twice, w...

many other biomedical journals dealing with cancer research, often publishes papers whose principal aim it is to test the association between quantative measurements of biological variables. When these are expressed on continuous scales, the statistics most frequently adopted to test their association are the Bravais-Pearson (parametric) and the Spearman (non-parametric) correlation coefficient...