Configural frequency analysis as a method of determining patients' preferred decision-making roles in dialysis.

Background: Numerous studies examined factors in promoting a patient preference for active participation in treatment decision making with only modest success. The purpose of this study was to identify types of patients wishing to participate in treatment decisions as well as those wishing to play a completely active or passive role based on a Germany-wide survey of dialysis patients; using a prediction typal analysis method that defines types as configurations of categories belonging to different attributes and takes particularly higher order interactions between variables into account.

Methods: After randomly splitting the original patient sample into two halves, an exploratory prediction configural frequency analysis (CFA) was performed on one-half of the sample (n = 1969) and the identified types were considered as hypotheses for an inferential prediction CFA for the second half (n = 1914).

[Epidemiology, course and prognosis of Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia--Preliminary results from the INSTINCT (INvasive STaphylococcus aureus INfection CohorT) cohort].

Objective: Staphylococcus aureus is a leading cause of bloodstream infection and S. aureus bacteremia (SAB) is one of the most severe infections acquired in hospital or in the community. The epidemiology and prognosis of this infection in Germany is not fully understood because of the lack of prospective data.