BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE A questionnaire was introduced by the New Zealand Arthroplasty Registry for use when evaluating the outcome of total ankle replacement surgery. We evaluated the reliability, validity, and responsiveness of the modified Swedish version of the questionnaire (SEFAS) in patients with osteoarthritis or inflammatory arthritis before and/or after their ankle was replaced or fuse...

BACKGROUND Composite indices of health care performance are an aggregation of underlying individual performance measures and are increasingly being used to rank hospitals. We sought to conduct an observational analysis to determine the influence of the opportunity-based and all-or-none composite performance measures on hospital rankings. METHODS AND RESULTS We examined 194 245 patients hospit...

PURPOSE Fostering ability to organize and use medical knowledge to guide data collection, make diagnostic decisions, and defend those decisions is at the heart of medical training. However, these abilities are not systematically examined prior to graduation. This study examined diagnostic justification (DXJ) ability of medical students shortly before graduation. METHOD All senior medical stud...

BACKGROUND The heterogeneity of health problems experienced by frail elderly patients makes it difficult to use a single standard measure to evaluate multiple outcomes of geriatric rehabilitation. Commonly, several measures are used, but an alternative is to use an individualized measure such as Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS). This study investigated the reliability, validity, and responsiveness...

OBJECTIVE To measure the impact of tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy (T&A) on children's behavioral and emotional problems using a standardized assessment. DESIGN Prospective study. SETTING Tertiary care children's hospital. PATIENTS Thirty-six children, aged 2 through 18 years, with symptoms of nighttime snoring, observed apneas, and daytime mouth breathing and physical examination results...

OBJECTIVES Atrial fibrillation (AF), the most common arrhythmia in elderly patients, accounts for 15% of strokes. Oral anticoagulation (OAC) can reduce the risk of stroke by 60% but is underprescribed. The HAS-BLED score (Hypertension, Abnormal renal or liver function, Stroke, Bleeding, Labile INR, Elderly, Drugs) can predict OAC bleeding complications. The authors hypothesized that use of HAS-...

The Standardized Assessment of Concussion (SAC) is a concussion screening tool used in identifying concussions by measuring performance decreases compared with baseline scores. This places great importance on valid baseline and postinjury scores. The objective was to examine baseline psychometric properties of SAC items using item analysis. One hundred fortyseven healthy adults (n = 72 men, n =...

Children with primary nocturnal enuresis often, but not always, score about 10% lower on standardized rating scales for self-esteem, or scores for symptoms similar to low self-esteem (sadness, anxiety, social fears, distress) than children without enuresis.

Objective. To assess the relation between executive dysfunction (ED) in Parkinson's disease (PD) and resting state functional connectivity evaluated using electroencephalography (EEG) coherence. Methods. Sixty-eight nondemented sporadic PD patients were assessed using the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome (BADS) to evaluate executive function. EEG coherence in the left frontop...

INTRODUCTION Although nonthyroidal illness syndrome is considered to be associated with adverse outcome in ICU patients, the performance of thyroid hormone levels in predicting clinical outcome in ICU patients is unimpressive. This study was conducted to assess the prognostic value of the complete thyroid indicators (free triiodothyronine (FT3), total triiodothyronine; free thyroxine, total thy...