Background: Many patients who have diabetes lack adequate knowledge, positive attitudes, and sufficient resources to achieve optimal outcomes in the management of their disease. A key to assessing the impact of pharmacists' interactions with diabetes patients is the resultant impact on patient knowledge, attitudes, and satisfaction. As such, it is important that quality instruments be used to obtain accurate and dependable measures of these outcomes.
Objective: To evaluate the validity of inferences made from 3 separate diabetes instruments used in the assessment of patient knowledge, attitudes, and satisfaction.
Methods: This pilot study enrolled 30 patients with diabetes mellitus to evaluate the following 3 instruments: (1) Check Your Hemoglobin A1CIQ, (2) the revised Diabetes Questionnaire, and (3) a satisfaction questionnaire. The instruments were used to assess patient knowledge of diabetes and diabetes-related complications, attitudes toward having diabetes mellitus, and satisfaction with the services provided in a pharmacist-run diabetes clinic, respectively. Rasch analysis was used to determine if the instruments were able to measure the concepts they are intended to measure when used in this sample.
Results: After evaluating the 3 instruments, it was determined that Instrument 1 displayed construct underrepresentation and some mistargeting. Moreover, Instrument 2 demonstrated reasonably good rating scale function but exhibited construct underrepresentation and ceiling effects. Finally, Instrument 3 did not meet the necessary requirements for proper rating scale function and displayed ceiling effects and mistargeting.
Conclusions: This pilot evaluation suggested that none of the instruments were useful in this population, which reinforces the need for researchers to use item response theories to examine the psychometric properties of instruments used in reporting various patient outcome measures. Pharmacists and other health care professionals should be alerted to potential problems with the validity of inferences made from underperforming instruments, so as to prevent inaccurate conclusions.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sapharm.2007.04.002 | DOI Listing |
Zookeys
January 2025
Peruvian University Cayetano Heredia, Av. Honorio Delgado 430, San Martín de Porres, Lima, Peru Peruvian University Cayetano Heredia Lima Peru.
Prawns of the genus represent a highly diverse group of high commercial value worldwide. Eight species have been reported from the Peruvian Pacific slope, but their phylogenetic relationships are still unknown. To investigate the systematics of species from Peru, morphological identification and molecular data from nucleotide sequences of three genes were used: cytochrome oxidase subunit I, 16S rRNA, and 28S rRNA.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHepat Oncol
December 2024
Gastrointestinal Malignancies Section, Thoracic & GI Malignancies Branch, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Precision medicine has emerged as a cornerstone in cancer treatment revolutionizing our approach across malignancies. Molecular profiling of biliary tract cancers (BTCs) has changed the treatment landscape positively by prolonging survival in an aggressively fatal malignancy in its advanced stages. The acquisition of tissue tumor DNA for genomic analysis in BTC is often anatomically challenging, limited by quantity and quality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMC Med Educ
January 2025
University of Minnesota Medical School, 420 Delaware Street SE, Mayo Building, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA.
Background: A common practice in assessment development, fundamental for fairness and consequently the validity of test score interpretations and uses, is to ascertain whether test items function equally across test-taker groups. Accordingly, we conducted differential item functioning (DIF) analysis, a psychometric procedure for detecting potential item bias, for three preclinical medical school foundational courses based on students' sex and race.
Methods: The sample included 520, 519, and 344 medical students for anatomy, histology, and physiology, respectively, collected from 2018 to 2020.
Sci Rep
January 2025
Faculty of Science and Technology, Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, Bangkok, 10300, Thailand.
Attention mechanisms such as the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) can help emphasize and refine the most relevant feature maps such as color, texture, spots, and wrinkle variations for the avocado ripeness classification. However, the CBAM lacks global context awareness, which may prevent it from capturing long-range dependencies or global patterns such as relationships between distant regions in the image. Further, more complex neural networks can improve model performance but at the cost of increasing the number of layers and train parameters, which may not be suitable for resource constrained devices.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFComput Biol Med
January 2025
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Lahore, Lahore Campus, Pakistan. Electronic address:
Glaucoma is an irreversible, progressive, degenerative eye disorder arising because of increased intraocular pressure, resulting in eventual vision loss if untreated. The QSPR relates, mathematically, by employing various algorithms, a specified property of a molecule that arises either from physical, chemical, or biological phenomena using various aspects of its structure. Here in, a similar application based on topological indices and inferences derived from the structure for the calculation of different drug properties like molar refractivity, refractive index, enthalpy, boiling points, molecular weight, and polarizability is presented.
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