For many years, therapists have assumed a relationship between impairment and disability. More recently, researchers have begun to examine this assumption. "Motor Function and Activities of Daily Living Assessments: A Study of Three Tests for Persons With Hemiplegia" by Filiatrault, Arsenault, Dutil, and Bourbonnais (AjOT, September 1991, pp. 806-810) is a laudable example of such an examinatio...

BACKGROUND Current literature examining associations between vitamin D and chronic disease generally use a single assessment of 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D], assuming the 25(OH)D concentration of an individual is consistent over time. METHODS We investigated the intraindividual variability between two measures of plasma 25(OH)D concentrations collected approximately five years apart (1997-20...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Increased echogenicity of the substantia nigra is a typical transcranial sonography finding in Parkinson disease. Experimental software for digital analysis of the echogenic substantia nigra area has been developed. The aim of this study was to compare the evaluation of substantia nigra echogenicity by using digital analysis with a manual measurement in patients with Park...

BACKGROUND Many studies have explored the diagnostic performance of soluble suppression of tumorigenicity-2 (sST2) for heart failure (HF), but the results are inconsistent. Here, we performed a meta-analysis to assess the role of sST2 in the diagnosis of HF. METHODS We searched PubMed, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, and Wanfang Database from incepti...

BACKGROUND Accurate measurement of free thyroxine (FT(4)) is important for diagnosing and managing thyroid disorders. Most laboratories measure FT(4) by direct analogue immunoassay methods. The validity of these methods have recently been questioned. The inverse log-linear relationship between FT(4) and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) is well described and provides a physiological rationale o...

BACKGROUND Physical activity (PA) is beneficial in reducing pain and improving function in lower limb osteoarthritis (OA), and is recommended as a first line treatment. Self-administered questionnaires are used to assess PA, but knowledge about reliability and validity of these PA questionnaires are limited, in particular for patients with OA. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relia...

Spearman distance is a permutation distance which might prove useful for coding, e.g. for codes on permutations. It turns out, however, that the Spearman geometry of strings is rather unruly from the point of view of error correction and error detection, and special care has to be taken to discriminate between the two notions of codeword distance and codeword distinguishability. All of this str...