OBJECTIVE To assess the methods used in the evaluation of measles vaccination coverage, identify quality concerns and provide recommendations for improvement. METHODS We reviewed surveys that were conducted to evaluate supplementary measles immunization activities in eastern and southern Africa during 2012 and 2013. We investigated the organization(s) undertaking each survey, survey design, s...

In biostatistics applications interest often focuses on the estimation of the distribution of a time-variable T . If one only observes whether or not T exceeds an observed monitoring time C, then the data structure is called current status data, also known as interval censored data, case I. We consider this data structure extended to allow the presence of both time-independent covariates and ti...

INTRODUCTION Stress is an important factor in the educational process. Teaching and learning are stressful processes. This stress can affect one's ability and change his/her performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate stressors of clinical education from the perspective of medical students in Yazd University of Medical Sciences. METHODS This descriptive-analytic study was conduc...

Personalized cancer therapy requires clinical trials with smaller sample sizes compared to trials involving unselected populations that have not been divided into biomarker subgroups. The use of exponential survival modeling for survival endpoints has the potential of gaining 35% efficiency or saving 28% required sample size (Miller, 1983), making personalized therapy trials more feasible. Howe...

UNLABELLED This work describes the methodology used to assess a strategy for implementing clinical practice guidelines (CPG) for cardiovascular risk control in a health area of Madrid. BACKGROUND The results on clinical practice of introducing CPGs have been little studied in Spain. The strategy used to implement a CPG is known to influence its final use. Strategies based on the involvement o...

When patients randomised to the control group of a randomised controlled trial are allowed to switch onto the experimental treatment, intention-to-treat analyses of the treatment effect are confounded because the separation of randomised groups is lost. Previous research has investigated statistical methods that aim to estimate the treatment effect that would have been observed had this treatme...

BACKGROUND Whether information from clinical trial registries (CTRs) and published randomised controlled trial (RCTs) differs remains unknown. Knowing more about discrepancies should alert those who rely on RCTs for medical decision-making to possible dissemination or reporting bias. To provide help in critically appraising research relevant for clinical practice we sought possible discrepancie...

BACKGROUND The CONSORT statement is intended to improve reporting of randomised controlled trials and focuses on minimising the risk of bias (internal validity). The applicability of a trial's results (generalisability or external validity) is also important, particularly for pragmatic trials. A pragmatic trial (a term first used in 1967 by Schwartz and Lellouch) can be broadly defined as a ran...

Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs) data are increasingly common and widely accepted in clinical investigations of symptoms. Agreements or differences regarding Doctor-Report Outcomes (DROs) VS PROs data are unclear. In this study, we conducted a clinical trial and investigated the agreement levels of DROs VS PROs in symptoms of diabetics. This study had a parallel self-controlled and double blind...