1,721,097 research outputs found
Childhood experience and health care use in adulthood: Nested case-control study
No full textBackground: Few studies have considered the role of childhood experiences in adult health care use. Aims: To examine the hypotheses that individuals frequently attending primary care report childhood adversities and illness exposures more commonly than the remainder of patients and that any association is independent of adult psychiatric disorder. Method: A nested case-control study was carried out in a single general practice in Manchester, UK. Fifty frequent attenders (randomly selected from adult patients in the top decile of consultation frequency) and fifty normal attenders (randomly selected from the remainder of adult patients) underwent a structured psychiatric interview and a detailed, semistructured interview of childhood experience. Results: There was a strong association between frequent attendance and childhood experiences. Multivariate analysis suggested that reported childhood illness exposures and reports of childhood adversity were each associated independently with adult consultation behaviour, even after adjustment for adult psychiatric disorder. Conclusions: Interventions for high users of health care may need to address childhood experiences of illness and childhood adversities, as well as adult psychiatric disorder
Genetic variation in neuroendocrine genes associates with somatic symptoms in the general population: results from the EPIFUND study
No full textObjective: functional somatic syndromes commonly occur together, share a genetic component and are associated with numerous somatic symptoms. This study aimed to determine if genetic variation in two neuroendocrine systems, the serotoninergic system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, was associated with the number of reported somatic symptoms.Methods: this population-based cohort study (Epidemiology of Functional Disorders) recruited participants from three primary care registers in the northwest of England. Somatic symptoms, anxiety, depression, and pain were assessed using the Somatic Symptoms Checklist, Hospital Anxiety and Depression scales, and body manikins, respectively, via a postal questionnaire. Tag Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) (r2>0.8) were selected for serotoninergic system genes (TPH2, SLC6A4 and HTR2A) and HPA axis genes (CRH, CRHR1, CRHBP, MC2R, POMC, NR3C1, and SERPINA6) and genotyped using Sequenom technology. Negative binomial regression was used to test for association between SNPs and the number of somatic symptoms. Stepwise-regression was used to identify independent effects and adjustments were made for anxiety, depression, and pain.Results: a total of 967 subjects were successfully genotyped for 143 (87%) SNPs. Multiple SNP associations with the number of somatic symptoms were observed in HTR2A and SERPINA6 as well as two SNPs in TPH2. Stepwise regression identified two effects in HTR2A and a single effect in TPH2 which were independent of anxiety, depression, and pain. A single effect was also identified in SERPINA6 but was no longer significant when adjusted for pain.Conclusion: this study finds association of SNPs in HTR2A, SERPINA6, and TPH2 with somatic symptoms implicating them as potentially important in the shared genetic component to functional somatic syndromes, although replication is required
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Primary care consultation predictors in men and women: A cohort study
No full textBackground. Women visit their doctors more than men, but comparatively few studies have explored gender differences in consultation in detail. Aims. To identify the factors that predicted the number of primary care consultations in men and women over a 5-year period. Design of study. Prospective cohort study with three waves of data collection by postal questionnaire. Setting. A single suburban general practice in Greater Manchester, UK. Method. Consultation data were sought from primary care records on a random sample of 800 adults. The main outcome measure was the number of consultations over the 5 years of the study. Questionnaire measures included the 12-item version of the General Health Questionnaire, the Illness Attitude Scales, a somatic symptom scale, a fatigue scale, and a functional assessment of disability. Results. Consultation data were obtained on 738 patients (445 women, 293 men, 92% of selected subjects). Longitudinal models of consultation over 5 years showed that changes in psychological distress were more strongly associated with consultation in women than in men, whereas cognitive factors (negative illness attitudes) were moss strongly associated with the consultation rate in men than women. Conclusion. The predictors of consultation in primary care may be different for men and women. A fuller understanding of the reasons for consultation may enable primary care doctors to better help individual patients, as well as perhaps contributing more generally to the development of gender specific interventions for those who consult unusually frequently. © British Journal of General Practice 2005
Somatization and health anxiety as predictors of health care use
No full textObjective: To assess whether the number of somatic symptoms and health anxiety are independent predictors of future health care use after adjusting for confounders. Methods: In a random sample of the adult UK population, questionnaires assessed the number of somatic symptoms (Somatic Symptom Inventory), health anxiety (Whiteley Index), anxiety/depression (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale), the number of physical illnesses and demographic variables. The number of consultations in primary care was obtained from medical records for 1 year before and after questionnaire assessment, and negative binomial regression analyses identified predictors of consultation rate. Results: The sample included 961 participants (58.0% response) with complete medical record data for 609 participants. After adjustment for consultation rate in the prior year, the predictors of subsequent consultation rate in primary care were the number of physical illnesses, off work through illness, Whiteley Index (incidence rate ratio [IRR] = 1.22, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.09-1.35), and the Whiteley Index-by-Somatic Symptom Inventory interaction term. Reported physical abuse predicted an increased consultation rate in women (IRR = 2.30, 95% CI = 1.08-4.90) but a reduced rate in men (IRR = 0.43, 95% CI = 0.22-0.84), interaction p = 0.003. Conclusions: These data raise the possibility that both increased health anxiety and number of bothersome somatic symptoms predict frequent medical consultations. A more complex model of predicting future health care use is needed than has been studied previously, which is potentially relevant to the current discussions of the proposed DSM-V and International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision, diagnostic guidelines regarding complex somatic symptom disorders. © 2012 by the American Psychosomatic Society
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