Supervisor and self-ratings of graduates from a medical school with a problem-based learning and standard curriculum track.

Background: Medical schools recognize the importance of following up on graduates to evaluate performance during residency. Such performance is of particular interest for schools with problem-based learning (PBL) and conventional curriculum tracks.

Purposes: Our purposes were to determine any differences in ratings of resident performance in 3 competency areas compared across two different curriculum tracks, 1st and 3rd postgraduate years, and self versus supervisor.

Effect of change of reference standard to NHANES III on interpretation of spirometric 'abnormality'.

The American Thoracic Society has recently recommended the use of NHANES III spirometric reference standard in the United States. The objective of this study was to better quantify the well-known 'problem' of the change in interpretation of spirometry, as a consequence of the change from the other commonly used reference standards (Morris, Kory, Crapo, Knudson 1976, and Knudson 1983) to NHANES III. This is a cross-sectional study of spirometries of 1,106 non-Hispanic Caucasian American adults, including 234 subjects with obstructive and 228 subjects with restrictive spirometric 'abnormalities'.

Obesity is associated with bronchial hyper-responsiveness in women.

The study's objective was to compare the bronchial hyper-responsiveness (BHR) between those with normal and increased weight and evaluate if the association was sex-specific. In this cross-sectional review of methacholine challenge test results of 1,141 adults for evaluation of respiratory symptoms, logistic regression analysis was conducted to adjust for covariates. When compared to normal weight, overweight or obese women showed a higher prevalence of symptomatic BHR with odds ratios of 1.