Combined financial incentives and behavioral weight management to enhance adherence with gestational weight gain guidelines: a randomized controlled trial.

Background: Excessive gestational weight gain, particularly among overweight and obese women, is associated with adverse perinatal outcomes. Current interventions to limit gestational weight gain have achieved only modest success.

Objective: We sought to improve adherence to gestational weight gain guidelines with a dual intervention of financial incentives and antenatal behavioral weight management.

A protocol for the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression: Item scoring rules, Rater training, and outcome accuracy with data on its application in a clinical trial.

Background: We present a fully articulated protocol for the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D), including item scoring rules, rater training procedures, and a data management algorithm to increase accuracy of scores prior to outcome analyses. The latter involves identifying potentially inaccurate scores as interviews with discrepancies between two independent raters on the basis of either scores >=5-point difference) or meeting threshold for depression recurrence status, a long-term treatment outcome with public health significance. Discrepancies are resolved by assigning two new raters, identifying items with disagreement per an algorithm, and reaching consensus on the most accurate scores for those items.