A Randomized Controlled Trial to Evaluate the Clinical Effectiveness of 3D-Printed Orthosis in the Management of Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis.

Study Design: Prospective randomized controlled trial.

Objective: To compare clinical effectiveness and quality of life (QoL) of the 3D-printed orthosis (3O) and conventional orthosis (CO) for adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS).

Summary Of Background Data: Using 3D printing technology to design and fabricate orthoses to manage AIS aiming to improve in-orthosis correction and patients' compliance that are considered essential factors of effective treatment.

Multigene pathway-based analyses identify nasopharyngeal carcinoma risk associations for cumulative adverse effects of TERT-CLPTM1L and DNA double-strand breaks repair.

The genetic etiology of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) and mechanisms for inherited susceptibility remain unclear. To examine genetic risk factors for NPC, we hypothesized that heritable risk is attributable to cumulative effects of multiple common low-risk variants. With the premise that individual SNPs only confer subtle effects for cancer risk, a multigenic pathway-based approach was used to systematically examine associations between NPC genetic susceptibility with SNPs in genes in DNA repair pathways and from previously identified cancer genome-wide association study analyses.

Social variations in access to hospital care for patients with colorectal, breast, and lung cancer between 1999 and 2006: retrospective analysis of hospital episode statistics.

Objectives: To determine the extent to which type of hospital admission (emergency compared with elective) and surgical procedure varied by socioeconomic circumstances, age, sex, and year of admission for colorectal, breast, and lung cancer.

Design: Repeated cross sectional study with data from individual patients, 1 April 1999 to 31 March 2006.

Setting: Hospital episode statistics (HES) dataset.

Sociodemographic variations in the contribution of secondary drug prevention to stroke survival at middle and older ages: cohort study.

Objectives: To determine the extent to which secondary drug prevention for patients with stroke in routine primary care varies by sex, age, and socioeconomic circumstances, and to quantify the effect of secondary drug prevention on one year mortality by sociodemographic group.

Design: Cohort study using individual patient data from the health improvement network primary care database.

Setting: England.

Primary care spirometry: test quality and the feasibility and usefulness of specialist reporting.

Background: Provision of spirometry for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a new requirement in primary care. Effective spirometry requires that tests and interpretations meet international criteria.

Aim: To assess the feasibility and usefulness of remote specialist reporting of primary care spirometry.

Combining the performance strengths of the logistic regression and neural network models: a medical outcomes approach.

The assessment of medical outcomes is important in the effort to contain costs, streamline patient management, and codify medical practices. As such, it is necessary to develop predictive models that will make accurate predictions of these outcomes. The neural network methodology has often been shown to perform as well, if not better, than the logistic regression methodology in terms of sample predictive performance.