Patients' and partners' health-related quality of life before and 4 months after coronary artery bypass grafting surgery.

Background: Patients having coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) often depend on their partners for assistance before and after surgery. Whilst patients' physical and mental health usually improves after surgery little is known about the partners' health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in CABG. If the partners' physical and emotional health is poor this can influence their caregiving role and ability to support the patient.

Coronary heart disease risk factors: concordance between patients and partners before and after bypass grafting surgery.

Background: Coronary heart disease (CHD) risk factor reduction is required to maximize the benefits to be gained from coronary artery bypass grafting. Risk factor reduction after surgery, however, is often incomplete and adherence rates are poor. The health behaviors of the cardiac partner can be supportive or can act to undermine the patient's motivation for change in risk factors.

Memory for pain? A comparison of nonexperiential estimates and patients' reports of the quality and intensity of postoperative pain.

Unlabelled: Prior research has questioned the extent to which postoperative retrospective ratings of acute pain actually reflect memory of that pain. To investigate this issue, pain ratings provided by patients who had undergone vascular surgery were compared with estimates of this pain provided by 2 groups of healthy, nonpatient participants with no personal experience of the surgery. Patient participants rated postoperative pain while actually experiencing it and again 4 to 6 weeks after surgery.

Nursing's ways of knowing and dual process theories of cognition.

Aim: This paper is a comparison of nursing's patterns of knowing with the systems identified by cognitive science, and evaluates claims about the equal-status relation between scientific and non-scientific knowledge.

Background: Ever since Carper's seminal paper in 1978, it has been taken for granted in the nursing literature that there are ways of knowing, or patterns of knowing, that are not scientific. This idea has recently been used to argue that the concept of evidence, typically associated with evidence-based practice, is inappropriately restricted because it is identified exclusively with scientific research.

Exploring the phenomenology of memory for pain: is previously experienced acute pain consciously remembered or simply known?

Unlabelled: Whether or not acute pain is recalled by consciously remembering it or by simply knowing about that past pain as an autobiographical fact, and the degree to which it can be accurately anticipated ("precalled") was investigated using the remember/know paradigm. Cold Pressor (CP) pain was induced in 97 healthy participants who precalled CP pain and then reported their actual experiences of CP pain, using the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) and a Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). Two weeks later, participants recalled the CP pain and indicated whether each retrospectively selected MPQ descriptor reflected their "remembering" or "knowing" about the pain.

Analgesia through the looking-glass? A randomized controlled trial investigating the effect of viewing a 'virtual' limb upon phantom limb pain, sensation and movement.

The extent to which viewing a 'virtual' limb, the mirror image of an intact limb, modifies the experience of a phantom limb, was investigated in 80 lower limb amputees before, during and after repeated attempts to simultaneously move both intact and phantom legs. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of two conditions, a control condition in which they only viewed the movements of their intact limb and a mirror condition in which they additionally viewed the movements of a 'virtual' limb. Although the mirror condition elicited a significantly greater number of phantom limb movements than the control condition, it did not attenuate phantom limb pain and sensations any more than the control condition.

A Scottish study of heel-prick blood sampling in newborn babies.

Objective: to conduct a randomised-controlled trial to investigate the effectiveness of two heel-prick devices (Tenderfoot and Genie Lancet) used in the newborn-baby screening test.

Design: a randomised-controlled trial.

Participants And Setting: the homes of 340 healthy term newborn babies discharged from the maternity unit of Stirling Royal Infirmary, Scotland.

A computerised guidance tree (decision aid) for hypertension, based on decision analysis: development and preliminary evaluation.

This paper discusses the piloting of a computerised decision aid that provides individualised information about hypertension to patients. The program is based on decision analysis, using decision trees as a way of structuring information. It incorporates the Framingham risk equation to assess a users' risk of coronary artery disease, together with a detailed assessment of the patient's current lifestyle and their willingness to change behaviour.

Remembering an everyday pain: the role of knowledge and experience in the recall of the quality of dysmenorrhoea.

The ability to describe the quality of a previous pain may be thought to be better if one had experienced that particular pain because information stored in episodic and/or semantic memory is available rather than if one had not and could only guess what the pain may be like on the basis of information stored in semantic memory. However research has shown that not only is the quality of labour pain poorly recalled by women who have given birth but also it is no better described by them than by women who have never given birth at all. In order to replicate this effect for an everyday pain, the ability to recall the quantity and the quality of dysmenorrhoea was measured in two groups of women.