Understanding online health information: Evaluation, tools, and strategies.

Objective: Considering the status of the Internet as a prominent source of health information, assessing online health material has become a central issue in patient education. We describe the strategies available to evaluate the characteristics of online health information, including readability, emotional content, understandability, usability.

Methods: Popular tools used in assessment of readability, emotional content and comprehensibility of online health information were reviewed.

Information quality and dynamics of patients' interactions on tonsillectomy web resources.

Information technologies have drastically altered the way patients gather health-related information. By analysing web resources on tonsillectomy, we expose information quality and dynamics of patients' interactions in the online continuum. Readability was assessed using Flesch Reading Ease (FRE), Flesch Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL), Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG), and Gunning Fog Index (GFI).

Pain modulation induced by respiration: phase and frequency effects.

The voluntary control of respiration is used as a common means to regulate pain and emotions and is fundamental to various relaxation and meditation techniques. The aim of the present study was to examine how breathing frequency and phase affect pain perception, spinal nociceptive activity (RIII-reflex) and brain activity (scalp somatosensory-evoked potentials - SEP's). In 20 healthy volunteers, painful electric shocks individually adjusted to 120% of the RIII-reflex threshold were delivered to the sural nerve near the end of inspiration or expiration phases, during three cued-breathing conditions: (1) slow breathing (0.

Cerebral and cerebrospinal processes underlying counterirritation analgesia.

Pain is a complex experience involving extensive interactions between brain and spinal cord processes. Various interventions that modulate pain, such as the application of a competing noxious stimulus (counterirritation), are thought to involve cerebrospinal regulation through diffuse noxious inhibitory controls (DNICs). However, no study has yet examined the relation between brain and spinal cord activity during counterirritation analgesia in humans.

Widespread hypersensitivity is related to altered pain inhibition processes in irritable bowel syndrome.

The mechanisms of chronic pain in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) have been widely investigated but remain unclear. The present study investigated the relation between visceral hypersensitivity, cutaneous thermal sensitivity, and central pain mechanisms. Rectal sensitivity was assessed with a barostat, and forearm and calf sensitivity with a contact thermode.