Imagery Ability and Imagery Perspective Preference: A Study of Their Relationship and Age- and Gender-Related Changes.

This study examined if imagery ability (i.e., vividness and temporal congruence between imagined and executed knee extensions) and imagery perspective preference were affected by ageing and gender.

Development of a transparent interactive decision interrogator to facilitate the decision-making process in health care.

Background: Decisions about the use of new technologies in health care are often based on complex economic models. Decision makers frequently make informal judgments about evidence, uncertainty, and the assumptions that underpin these models.

Objectives: Transparent interactive decision interrogator (TIDI) facilitates more formal critique of decision models by decision makers such as members of appraisal committees of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in the UK.

How valuable are multiple treatment comparison methods in evidence-based health-care evaluation?

Objectives: To compare the use of pair-wise meta-analysis methods to multiple treatment comparison (MTC) methods for evidence-based health-care evaluation to estimate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of alternative health-care interventions based on the available evidence.

Methods: Pair-wise meta-analysis and more complex evidence syntheses, incorporating an MTC component, are applied to three examples: 1) clinical effectiveness of interventions for preventing strokes in people with atrial fibrillation; 2) clinical and cost-effectiveness of using drug-eluting stents in percutaneous coronary intervention in patients with coronary artery disease; and 3) clinical and cost-effectiveness of using neuraminidase inhibitors in the treatment of influenza. We compare the two synthesis approaches with respect to the assumptions made, empirical estimates produced, and conclusions drawn.

Molecular detection of Giardia contamination in water bodies in a zoo.

We used a combined microscopy-molecular approach to determine the occurrence and identities of waterborne Giardia sp. cysts isolated from 18 separate, 10l grab samples collected from a Malaysian zoo. Microscopy revealed that 17 of 18 samples were Giardia cyst positive with concentrations ranging from 1 to 120 cysts/l.

Heritability of cardiovascular and personality traits in 6,148 Sardinians.

In family studies, phenotypic similarities between relatives yield information on the overall contribution of genes to trait variation. Large samples are important for these family studies, especially when comparing heritability between subgroups such as young and old, or males and females. We recruited a cohort of 6,148 participants, aged 14-102 y, from four clustered towns in Sardinia.