OBJECTIVE Using 24-h ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, we studied the repeatability of the morning blood pressure in older (> or =60 years) patients with isolated systolic hypertension. METHODS The sleep-through morning surge was the morning blood pressure minus the lowest nighttime blood pressure. The preawake morning surge was the morning blood pressure minus the preawake blood pressure...

Introduction: The aim of this study was to design a standard questionnaire facilitating the evaluation of the knowledge and attitude of medical students regarding radiation protection. Methods: At first, a 30-item questionnaire was prepared. The scale construction procedure was performed using content validity assessment. Considering objectives, some items were...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The purpose of the study is to compare the reliability of the Barthel activities of daily living score, which assesses disability, with the Rankin scale, which assesses handicap, and to determine their mutual agreement. METHODS Fifty patients with stroke of varying severity were identified by a community-based stroke register and interviewed by two of three research nur...

We present a first analysis of interannotator agreement for the DIT tagset of dialogue acts, a comprehensive, layered, multidimensional set of 86 tags. Within a dimension or a layer, subsets of tags are often hierarchically organised. We argue that especially for such highly structured annotation schemes the well-known kappa statistic is not an adequate measure of inter-annotator agreement. Ins...

The aim of this study was to verify the agreement between different approaches for estimating levels of physical activity in adolescents. One questionnaire was administered to parents and two were administered to the adolescents. This was a cross-sectional analysis of data collected in the 2004-2005 follow-up of the 1993 Pelotas (Brazil) birth cohort study. Parents or guardians answered the fol...

In clinical studies, it is often of interest to see the diagnostic agreement among clinicians on certain symptoms. Previous work has focused on the agreement between two clinicians under two different conditions or the agreement among multiple clinicians under one condition. Few have discussed the agreement study with a design where multiple clinicians examine the same group of patients under t...

OBJECTIVE This study was undertaken to evaluate the ability of preoperative endometrial sampling to accurately diagnose high-grade endometrial tumors. STUDY DESIGN Three hundred sixty endometrial cancer patients had preoperative endometrial sampling and hysterectomy specimens that underwent pathologic review at a single institution from 1995 to 2005. The sensitivity of Pipelle and curettage t...

AIM To examine the feasibility of using peer review for the quality control of online materials. METHODS We analyzed the inter-rater agreement on the quality of epidemiological lectures online, based on the Global Health Network Supercourse lecture library. We examined the agreement among reviewers by looking at kappa statistics and intraclass correlations. Seven expert reviewers examined and...

This is the first study in Australia to test definitions of various types of 'episodes of care'. The definitions reported here are those used in the 1996 National Sub-Acute and Non-Acute Patient (SNAP) Casemix Classification Study. The study collected data on a total of 683 patients at 10 hospitals and 2 community health services providing a range of rehabilitation, aged care and community care...