Patients or volunteers? The impact of motivation for trial participation on the efficacy of patient decision Aids: a secondary analysis of a Cochrane systematic review.

Background: Efficacy of patient decision aids (PtDAs) may be influenced by trial participants' identity either as patients seeking to benefit personally from involvement or as volunteers supporting the research effort.

Aim: To determine if study characteristics indicative of participants' trial identity might influence PtDA efficacy.

Methods: We undertook exploratory subgroup meta-analysis of the 2011 Cochrane review of PtDAs, including trials that compared PtDA with usual care for treatment decisions.

A systematic review of the effectiveness of treatments in altering the natural history of intermittent exotropia.

Evidence of effectiveness of interventions for treatment of childhood intermittent exotropia, X(T), is unclear. We conducted a systematic review to locate, appraise and synthesise evidence of effectiveness, including twelve electronic databases, supplemented with hand searches and expert contact. We included randomised controlled trials, quasi-experimental and cohort studies with a comparison group examining interventions for divergence excess, simulated divergence excess or basic type X(T) in children, up to and including 18 years of age, followed for at least 6 months.

Incorporating the patient perspective: a critical review of clinical practice guidelines for implantable cardioverter defibrillator therapy.

Purpose: Implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) are recommended for patients with heart failure and/or ventricular arrhythmias at risk of sudden cardiac death. Guidelines for ICD implantation are derived from robust clinical data. However, critical factors which might influence treatment decisions include patient preferences.

The place and practices of well-being in local governance.

The concept of well-being has become prominent within national policy goals in the UK since the end of the 1990s. However, the concept of well-being remains ill defined, an instability that is increasingly understood as problematic to policy making. We engage with this terminological instability through an exploration of how the concept of well-being is practised discursively in local governance and critically examine the place of the concept in local policy making.

Reducing health inequalities in priority public health conditions: using rapid review to develop proposals for evidence-based policy.

Background: In November 2008, the Secretary of State for Health (England) commissioned an independent review to propose effective strategies for reducing health inequalities. Review task groups were given just 3 months to make preliminary evidence-based recommendations. In this paper, we describe the methodology used, and the recommendations made, by the group tasked with inequalities in priority public health conditions.

Risk factors for pediatric invasive pneumococcal disease in the Intermountain West, 1996-2002.

Purpose: In response to concerns that the epidemiology of pediatric invasive pneumococcal disease (IPD) in the Intermountain West (i.e., Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and parts of Arizona and Nevada) was poorly understood and might differ from elsewhere in the United States, a case-control study was undertaken to determine factors associated with IPD during 1996-2002.