Development of the Saini-Hodgins Addiction Risk Potential of Games (SHARP-G) Scale: An International Delphi study.

Background And Objectives: As the gaming industry experiences exponential growth, concerns about gaming disorder (GD) also grow. It is crucial to understand the structural features of games that can interact with individual characteristics of gamers to promote GD. This research consolidates the views of an international body of panelists to create an assessment tool for gauging the addictive potential of distinct games.

Associations between Health Behaviors, Health Self-Efficacy, and Long-Term Outcomes in Survivors of Childhood Cancer: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Objectives: Many survivors of childhood cancer experience multiple long-term chronic health conditions. Health behaviors are important because they contribute to chronic disease yet are highly modifiable. With growing pressure on cancer services, alternative models of care are required to address survivorship care needs.

Persistent Symptoms, Quality of Life, and Correlates with Health Self-Efficacy in Adolescent and Young Adult Survivors of Childhood Cancer.

The numbers of adolescent and young adult (AYA) survivors of childhood cancer are exponentially growing. To ensure suitable services are available to meet the needs of this growing population, understanding the experience of late effects, quality of life, and potentially modifiable factors, such as self-efficacy, is required. AYA survivors of childhood cancer recruited through an After Cancer Therapy Service at a Children's Hospital rated their symptoms experience, quality of life, and self-efficacy using the Patient Reported Outcome Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events, Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-General (FACT-G), and Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS), respectively.

Recruitment principles and strategies for supportive care research in pediatric oncology.

Background: Variations in clinical practice contribute to negative outcomes for children with cancer. Research in this area is imperative to standardise practice, yet such research is challenging to undertake, and a significant proportion of studies fail. A common reason for failure is poor recruitment, yet little information is available to support researchers and clinicians planning such research.

Sonographic visibility of cannulas using convex ultrasound transducers.

The key for safe ultrasound (US)-guided punctures is a good visibility of the cannula. When using convex transducers for deep punctures, the incident angle between US beam and cannula varies along the cannula leading to a complex visibility pattern. Here, we present a method to systematically investigate the visibility throughout the US image.

Gambling-Related Cognitive Distortions in Residential Treatment for Gambling Disorder.

Gambling-related cognitive distortions are associated with gambling disorder severity, but few studies have provided an in-depth examination of the interrelationship between cognitive distortions, gambling severity, psychiatric comorbidity and treatment outcomes. The present study sought to identify factors associated with elevated cognitive distortions among problem gamblers entering residential treatment, examine changes in cognitive distortions through treatment, and explore the association between cognitive distortions and treatment outcomes. Pre- and post-treatment data were extracted from the charts of 125 individuals who participated in a 21-day residential treatment program for gambling disorder.

VARiD: a variation detection framework for color-space and letter-space platforms.

Motivation: High-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies are transforming the study of genomic variation. The various HTS technologies have different sequencing biases and error rates, and while most HTS technologies sequence the residues of the genome directly, generating base calls for each position, the Applied Biosystem's SOLiD platform generates dibase-coded (color space) sequences. While combining data from the various platforms should increase the accuracy of variation detection, to date there are only a few tools that can identify variants from color space data, and none that can analyze color space and regular (letter space) data together.

SHRiMP: accurate mapping of short color-space reads.

The development of Next Generation Sequencing technologies, capable of sequencing hundreds of millions of short reads (25-70 bp each) in a single run, is opening the door to population genomic studies of non-model species. In this paper we present SHRiMP - the SHort Read Mapping Package: a set of algorithms and methods to map short reads to a genome, even in the presence of a large amount of polymorphism. Our method is based upon a fast read mapping technique, separate thorough alignment methods for regular letter-space as well as AB SOLiD (color-space) reads, and a statistical model for false positive hits.

Determining the effectiveness of critical pathways for coronary artery bypass graft patients: retrospective comparison of readmission rates.

The article describes a study performed to determine whether the use of the critical path tool made a difference in the readmission rates of patients after coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery compared with CABG patients cared for without the critical path tool. The sample for this retrospective study consisted of 780 specific patient medical records from the medical record department. Examination of the data revealed no statistically significant difference in readmission for CABG patients cared for with critical paths and those cared for without critical paths.

Prevalence of psychiatric morbidity in the adult population of a rural South African village.

We report on the first South African two-stage community prevalence study of psychiatric morbidity, conducted in Mamre, a rural "coloured' village, 50 km from Cape Town. Randomly selected adults (N = 481) were assessed using the Self-Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ) as a first-stage screen and the Present State Examination (PSE-9) was administered to a proportion of the sample (N = 121) as the second-stage criterion. Demographic, health care utilization, and substance abuse data were also collected.

A comparison of conventional dialytic therapy and acute continuous hemodiafiltration in the management of acute renal failure in the critically ill.

Objective: To compare and contrast the clinical outcomes in critically ill patients with acute renal failure managed with either acute continuous hemodiafiltration or conventional dialytic therapies.

Design: Retrospective review of the medical records of 167 consecutive cases of acute renal failure treated at a single center (July 1982-July 1991). Scoring for illness severity (APACHE II, number of failing organs) and assessment of outcome in terms of biochemical control of azotemia, ARF therapy-related morbidity, and overall morbidity and mortality.

Acute renal failure in critical illness. Conventional dialysis versus acute continuous hemodiafiltration.

The dialytic therapy of choice in critically ill patients with acute renal failure (ARF) is a matter of controversy. The clinical outcome of such patients managed with either conventional dialytic therapy (CDT) or acute continuous hemodiafiltration (ACHD) was compared through retrospective review of medical records from the intensive care unit of a tertiary institution. Records from 167 critically ill patients with ARF consecutively treated in the same intensive care unit were reviewed.

The development of a framework for assessing developing conversational skills.

A framework for investigating the development of conversational skills in children, comprising the areas of topic control, repair of communication breakdown and linguistic cohesion, was devised. This was undertaken by a process of collating information from some existing pragmatic profiles and the developmental literature. The framework was then modified inductively to accommodate features of the data obtained from 12 normally developing English-speaking children in the age groups three, four and five years.