Effectiveness of prediabetes nutrition shared medical appointments: prevention of diabetes.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of a nutrition-based shared medical appointment (SMA) intervention in the treatment of prediabetes compared to the individualized counseling standard of care.

Methods: A randomized controlled trial design comparing health outcomes in patients with prediabetes attending either an individualized counseling (control group) or three 90-minute nutrition SMA (intervention group) sessions. Demographic, anthropometric (weight and body mass index), clinical (blood pressure), and biochemical (lipid profile, fasting blood sugar, glycated hemoglobin, albumin-to-creatinine ratio) measures were obtained from all participants at baseline, at 3 months, and at 1 year.

Limited-sampling strategies for anti-infective agents: systematic review.

Background: Area under the concentration-time curve (AUC) is a pharmacokinetic parameter that represents overall exposure to a drug. For selected anti-infective agents, pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic parameters, such as AUC/MIC (where MIC is the minimal inhibitory concentration), have been correlated with outcome in a few studies. A limited-sampling strategy may be used to estimate pharmacokinetic parameters such as AUC, without the frequent, costly, and inconvenient blood sampling that would be required to directly calculate the AUC.

Disease management in Canada: surmounting barriers to adoption.

Disease Management (DM) programs are used to optimize economic outcomes and improve patient outcomes. Despite this, relative to the United States, Canadian health care organizations have been slow to adopt them. The objective of this article is to examine the concept of DM programs, the existing evidence to support their use and the barriers to their adoption in Canada.

Selection of atypical antipsychotics for the management of schizophrenia.

Objective: To review the evidence for selecting one atypical antipsychotic agent over another for management of schizophrenia.

Data Sources: A literature search of MEDLINE (1966-June 2003), EMBASE (1998-June 2003), and the Cochrane Library was conducted using the following terms: schizophrenia, quetiapine, ziprasidone, olanzapine, aripiprazole, and risperidone. Bibliographies of relevant articles were hand-searched for additional references.