APA national audit of pediatric opioid infusions.

Introduction: A prospective audit of neonates, infants, and children receiving opioid infusion techniques managed by pediatric acute pain teams from across the United Kingdom and Eire was undertaken over a period of 17 months. The aim was to determine the incidence, nature, and severity of serious clinical incidents (SCIs) associated with the techniques of continuous opioid infusion, patient-controlled analgesia, and nurse-controlled analgesia in patients aged 0-18.

Methods: The audit was funded by the Association of Paediatric Anaesthetists (APA) and performed by the acute pain services of 18 centers throughout the United Kingdom.

[Guidelines for the routine assessment of respiratory surgical risk: thoracic radiography].

Through the three years between June 1995 and June 1998 the authors applied an evaluation schedule for the respiratory surgical risk to all the patients undergoing general surgery. Chest X-ray was included in this schedule as a first-level test and it was performed systematically on all the patients. The purpose of the study was to verify the effectiveness of chest X-ray as a routine examination of the respiratory performance, evaluating its predictive value on 1715 cases.

A cooperative methodology to build conceptual models in medicine.

We designed a methodology to perform distribute activities on conceptual modelling among cooperating centers. Our methodology assigns responsibilities and tasks and regulates interactions preserving coherence; it passes through the construction of unambiguous paraphrases to make explicit the context within the original sources, and through their compositional representation in an intermediate language. The process is intrinsically iterative, with continuous feedbacks and refinements, alternating analytic view on details and synthetic view on regularities and structures.

Clinical protocol development using Inter/IntraNet technology: the FENARETE system.

In this work we present FENARETE, a software tool to design and distribute clinical protocols in an Inter/IntraNet framework. We consider a medical protocol as a clinical behaviour scheme, formally and clearly defined with sufficient details. Our work allows the knowledge content of any clinical protocol to be fully represented in a symbolic style.

Age-specific incidence and duration of known diabetes. The Cremona Study.

Objective: To estimate the overall and age-specific incidence of known diabetes and its total duration through prevalence data and to assess the consistency of the results by mortality analysis of the same cohort.

Research Design And Methods: Two different sources were used. The first was a representative sample of 2,274 prevalent known-diabetic subjects.

The effect of cigarette-smoking on cardiovascular risk factors: a study of monozygotic twins discordant for smoking.

The association of cigarette smoking with the development of occlusive vascular disease is firmly established. Unfavourable changes in a series of variables held independent risk factors for the development of vascular lesions (HDL-cholesterol, haematocrit, white blood cell count, fibrinogen and plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1)) are thought to be directly influenced by cigarette smoking. However, the role played by the genotype in the effect of smoking on the above parameters has not been investigated.