The COMET Handbook: version 1.0.

The selection of appropriate outcomes is crucial when designing clinical trials in order to compare the effects of different interventions directly. For the findings to influence policy and practice, the outcomes need to be relevant and important to key stakeholders including patients and the public, health care professionals and others making decisions about health care. It is now widely acknowledged that insufficient attention has been paid to the choice of outcomes measured in clinical trials.

Citation analysis did not provide a reliable assessment of core outcome set uptake.

Objectives: The aim of the study was to evaluate citation analysis as an approach to measuring core outcome set (COS) uptake, by assessing whether the number of citations for a COS report could be used as a surrogate measure of uptake of the COS by clinical trialists.

Study Design And Setting: Citation data were obtained for COS reports published before 2010 in five disease areas (systemic sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, eczema, sepsis and critical care, and female sexual dysfunction). Those publications identified as a report of a clinical trial were examined to identify whether or not all outcomes in the COS were measured in the trial.

Angiotensin potentiates excitatory sensory synaptic transmission to medial solitary tract nucleus neurons.

Femtomole doses of angiotensin (ANG) II microinjected into nucleus tractus solitarii (nTS) decrease blood pressure and heart rate, mimicking activation of the baroreflex, whereas higher doses depress this reflex. ANG II might generate cardioinhibitory responses by augmenting cardiovascular afferent synaptic transmission onto nTS neurons. Intracellular recordings were obtained from 99 dorsal medial nTS region neurons in rat medulla horizontal slices to investigate whether ANG II modulated short-latency excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs) evoked by solitary tract (TS) stimulation.