1,720,961 research outputs found
A 5-year prospective cohort study on health-related quality of life in patients with narcolepsy.
No full textOBJECTIVE: To evaluate the 5-year variation of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and mood symptoms in a cohort of patients with narcolepsy.
METHODS: Adults attending the Sleep Centre of the Department of Neurological Sciences, University of Bologna in 1997 and meeting the International Classification of Sleep Disorders-Revised criteria for the diagnosis of narcolepsy were eligible. Included patients self-administered the Medical Outcome Short Form-36 (SF-36) and the Zung depression scale (ZDS) prospectively in 1998 and 2003.
RESULTS: There was no significant difference between 1998 and 2003 measures of SF-36 and ZDS in the 54 patients included. About 25% of them showed moderate or severe mood symptoms in both observations. ZDS score (inversely) and duration of disease (directly) explained a percentage of variance of role physical, vitality (VT), social functioning (SF) and role emotional. At the second observation VT and SF had a further percentage of variance explained by excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) and age at onset. Self-reported diabetes frequency doubled after 5 years (from 7% to 17%).
CONCLUSIONS: Patients with narcolepsy show a stable impairment of HRQoL in a 5-year period with respect to Italian normative data. Mood status and EDS negatively influence their HRQoL while disease duration has a positive influence
Accuracy of ICD-9 codes for acute stroke in hospital discharge records
No full textBackground
Discharge ICD-9-CM (International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision, Clinical Modification) codes have been used to identify patients with acute stroke for epidemiological, quality of care, and cost studies. However, outcome research based on data routinely collected for administrative purposes requires a preliminary assessment of the accuracy of codes in order to avoid measurement bias. The aim of this study was to determine the accuracy of the primary ICD-9-CM codes for stroke discharged from the Stroke Unit (SU) and from other wards of Sant’Orsola-Malpighi Hospital of Bologna (Italy). We hypothesized that coding in patients discharged from the Stroke Unit would be more accurate than in other wards.
Methods
We identified all patients who were discharged in 2007 from the Sant’Orsola-Malpighi Hospital of Bologna with a discharge diagnosis of stroke. We used highly specific ICD 9-CM codes for ischemic stroke (433.x1, 434.x1,436, 99702) and intracerebral hemorrhage (431). We reviewed medical records of a random sample of 274 cohort members (SU, N=117, other wards, N=157).
Sample size was determined using power analysis. International criteria for case definition were used to review clinical charts.
Results
Chart review identified 19 patients (6.9%) who did not meet study criteria for acute ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke. The proportion of patients not meeting diagnostic criteria differed between SU and other wards (2/117, 1.7% vs. 17/157, 10.8%, Fisher exact test, p=0.002).
Thus the overall PPV of the primary discharge diagnosis for identifying acute stroke was 92.7%, with a difference of about 9% between the SU and other wards (98.3% vs. 89.2%).
Conclusions
The PPV of incident strokes both in the SU and in other wards is higher than in other reports in the literature. Although an unknown percentage of strokes are missed, this group of proven acute stroke patients can be reliably used for outcome studies
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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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