Trials evaluating the same interventions rarely measure or report identical outcomes. This limits the possibility of aggregating effect sizes across studies to generate high-quality evidence through systematic reviews and meta-analyses. To address this problem, core outcome sets (COS) establish agreed sets of outcomes to be used in all future…

Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most important and powerful methods in chemometrics as well as in a wealth of other areas. Running a PCA results in two main elements, the score plot and the loading plot; the score plot provides the location of the samples, and the loading plot indicates correlations among variables, the trends in…

Introduction: Our goal was to compare behavioral- and information-based interventions aimed at increasing prescription of inspiratory muscle training (IMT) for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) by interdisciplinary teams during pulmonary rehabilitation (PR). Methods: Six hospital PR programs were randomly assigned to a…

Two clinical courses for first-year dental students were designed to develop students' interaction skills through actual patient case presentations and discussions and an interdisciplinary teaching approach. Results indicate students preferred the case presentations, with or without lecture, to the lecture-only approach and felt they learned more…

Communication is a major problem in the management of patients. Miscommunication occurs frequently in populations with low reading skills, illiteracy does not completely account for the observed low rates of recall of communicated information. Transmission of the message also plays an important role. Successful strategies to improve communication…