Absolute pitch (AP)--the ability to name a musical note in the absence of a reference note--is a rare ability whose relevance to musical proficiency has so far been unclear. Sixty trained musicians--thirty who self-reported AP and thirty with equivalent age of onset and duration of musical training--were administered a test for AP and also a musical dictation test not requiring AP. Performance ...

OBJECTIVES This study aimed to investigate patients' willingness to initiate a preventive treatment and compared two established effect measures to the newly developed Delay of Events (DoE) measure that expresses treatment effect as a gain in event-free time. METHODS In this cross-sectional, randomized survey experiment in the general Swedish population,1079 respondents (response rate 60.9%) ...

introduction accurate estimation of the skin-absorbed dose in external radiation therapy is essential to estimating the probability of secondary carcinogenesis induction materials and methods electron contamination in prostate radiotherapy was investigated using the monte carlo (mc) code calculation. in addition, field size dependence of the skin dose was assessed. excess cancer risk induced by...

An experiment was conducted to determine whether a commercial strain of turkey hens exhibits relative photorefractoriness (rPR) during a reproductive cycle and to ascertain whether plasma levels of certain hormones early in the reproductive cycle might be associated with subsequent expression of rPR or absolute photorefractoriness (aPR). Twenty-seven percent of hens maintained on a stimulatory ...

OBJECTIVES Randomised controlled trials report group-level treatment effects. However, an individual patient confronting a treatment decision needs to know whether that person's expected treatment benefit will exceed the expected treatment harm. We describe a flexible model for individualising a treatment decision. It individualises group-level results from randomised trials using clinical pred...

BACKGROUND The identification of high-risk patients could form a basis for targetted intervention following an emergency medical admission. METHODS All emergency admissions to our institution over 12 years (2002-13) were included. An Illness Severity method based on admission laboratory parameters, previously developed between 2002 and 2007, was investigated for the 2008-13 cohort. We compare...

BACKGROUND A major marketing technique used by pharmaceutical companies is direct-to-physician marketing. This form of marketing frequently employs promotional marketing brochures, based on clinical research, which may influence how a physician prescribes medicines. This study's objective was to investigate whether or not the information in promotional brochures presented to physicians by pharm...

CONTEXT Ongoing efforts to improve the quality of reporting for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) include the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) statement. We examined the frequency of explicit reporting of the number needed to treat (NNT) and the absolute risk reduction (ARR) in RCTs. METHODS Five frequently cited journals were investigated: Annals of Internal Medicine, B...

In randomized controlled trials (RCTs), treatment assignment is unconfounded with baseline covariates, allowing outcomes to be directly compared between treatment arms. When outcomes are binary, the effect of treatment can be summarized using relative risks, absolute risk reductions and the number needed to treat (NNT). When outcomes are time-to-event in nature, the effect of treatment on the a...