Assessing the effects of bias on the magnitude of outcomes in clinical studies: lessons for the research community?

2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (9) ◽  
pp. 773-774 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis J. Hughes
1994 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Sherwin

There is significant evidence that the health needs of women and minorities have been neglected by a medical research community whose agendas and protocols tend to focus on more advantaged segments of society. In response, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States have recently issued new policies aimed at increasing the utilization of women in clinical studies. As well, the U.S. Congress passed the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, which specifically mandates increased inclusion of women and racial and ethnic groups in clinical studies. On the face of it, such gender and race-specific policies would appear to be morally problematic because traditionally ethics opposes the use of sex or race as legitimate criteria for distributions of benefits or burdens in social policies. Hence, these policies pose some significant moral questions. Feminist ethics provides us with a framework for evaluating such policies because of its readiness to recognize that socially and politically significant factors such as sex and race are morally relevant in setting public policy. Of course, feminist ethics does not simply endorse all appeals to sex and race but only the policies in which attention to such factors will contribute to social justice. In this essay, I Identify some of the Important ethical questions that a feminist ethics perspective raises about research policies devised to promote the Inclusion of women in clinical studies.


Viruses ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Camille Esneau ◽  
Alexandra Cate Duff ◽  
Nathan W. Bartlett

Rhinoviruses (RVs) have been reported as one of the main viral causes for severe respiratory illnesses that may require hospitalization, competing with the burden of other respiratory viruses such as influenza and RSV in terms of severity, economic cost, and resource utilization. With three species and 169 subtypes, RV presents the greatest diversity within the Enterovirus genus, and despite the efforts of the research community to identify clinically relevant subtypes to target therapeutic strategies, the role of species and subtype in the clinical outcomes of RV infection remains unclear. This review aims to collect and organize data relevant to RV illness in order to find patterns and links with species and/or subtype, with a specific focus on species and subtype diversity in clinical studies typing of respiratory samples.


Author(s):  
Abeed Sarker ◽  
Sahithi Lakamana ◽  
Whitney Hogg-Bremer ◽  
Angel Xie ◽  
Mohammed Ali Al-Garadi ◽  
...  

AbstractObjectiveTo mine Twitter to quantitatively analyze COVID-19 symptoms self-reported by users, compare symptom distributions against clinical studies, and create a symptom lexicon for the research community.Materials and methodsWe retrieved tweets using COVID-19-related keywords, and performed several layers of semi-automatic filtering to curate self-reports of positive-tested users. We extracted COVID-19-related symptoms mentioned by the users, mapped them to standard IDs, and compared the distributions with multiple studies conducted in clinical settings.ResultsWe identified 203 positive-tested users who reported 932 symptoms using 598 unique expressions. The most frequently-reported symptoms were fever/pyrexia (65%), cough (56%), body aches/pain (40%), headache (35%), fatigue (35%), and dyspnea (34%) amongst users who reported at least 1 symptom. Mild symptoms, such as anosmia (26%) and ageusia (24%) were frequently reported on Twitter, but not in clinical studies.ConclusionThe spectrum of COVID-19 symptoms identified from Twitter may complement those identified in clinical settings.


CNS Spectrums ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Hollander ◽  
Ricki Robinson ◽  
Doug Compton

This issue of CNS Spectrums represents a milestone for both those affected by autism and related disorders and for clinicians and researchers who provide help and support to these individuals. In order to improve the lives of a rapidly increasing number of patients with this diagnosis, it is critical for the medical and research community to apply a collaborative and consistent strategy for clinical studies in autism.The five articles that follow are a synopsis of the five subcommittees of the Autism Clinical Trials Task Force (ACTTF), a collaborative panel of experts convened by the Cure Autism Now (CAN) foundation in the spring of 2002. These subcommittees focused on key issues in clinical trials of autism, including subject selection, outcome measures, study design, biological measures, and governmental issues. CAN brought together this panel of participants from academia, government, and industry for the ACTTF think tank. The panel was organized and chaired by Eric Hollander, MD, and Ricki Robinson, MD, MPH. The overarching goal was to clarify what was known about the state of the art of the field in this area, what key information was still unknown, and to implement specific approaches and suggestions for studies which would provide information to fill in the missing gaps in our knowledge base.


Author(s):  
Charles W. Allen

High voltage TEMs were introduced commercially thirty years ago, with the installations of 500 kV Hitachi instruments at the Universities of Nogoya and Tokyo. Since that time a total of 51 commercial instruments, having maximum accelerating potentials of 0.5-3.5 MV, have been delivered. Prices have gone from about a dollar per volt for the early instruments to roughly twenty dollars per volt today, which is not so unreasonable considerinp inflation and vastly improved electronics and other improvements. The most expensive HVEM (the 3.5 MV instrument at Osaka University) cost about 5 percent of the construction cost of the USA's latest synchrotron.Table 1 briefly traces the development of HVEM in this country for the materials sciences. There are now only three available instruments at two sites: the 1.2 MeV HVEM at Argonne National Lab, and 1.0 and 1.5 MeV instruments at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Fortunately, both sites are user facilities funded by DOE for the materials research community.


1950 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 743-756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles A. Jones
Keyword(s):  

2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Schick

The following study is based on a sample of 241 9-13-year-old children (66 children from divorced parents, 175 children from non divorced parents). They were examined for differences regarding anxiety, self-esteem, different areas of competence, and degree of behavior problems. With a focus on the children’s experiences, the clinically significant differences were examined. Clinically significant differences, revealing more negative outcomes for the children of divorce, were only found for social anxiety and unstable performance. The frequency of clinical significant differences was independent of the length of time the parents had been separated. The perceived destructiveness of conflict between the parents one of four facets of interparental conflict in this study functioned as a central mediator of the statistically significant group differences. The children’s perception of the father’s social support was a less reliable indicator of variance. Further studies should try to make underlying theoretical assumptions about the effects of divorce more explicit, to distinguish clearly between mediating variables, and to investigate them with respect to specific divorce adjustment indicators.


Author(s):  
Anne Andronikof

Based on an analysis of John Exner’s peer-reviewed published work from 1959 to 2007, plus a brief comment for an editorial in Rorschachiana, the author draws a comprehensive picture of the scientific work of this outstanding personality. The article is divided into three sections: (1) the experimental studies on the Rorschach, (2) the clinical studies using the Rorschach, and (3) Exner’s “testament,” which we draw from the last paper he saw published before his death (Exner, 2001/2002). The experimental studies were aimed at better understanding the nature of the test, in particular the respective roles of perception and projection in the response process. These fundamental studies led to a deeper understanding of the complex mechanisms involved in the Rorschach responses and introduced some hypotheses about the intentions of the author of the test. The latter were subsequently confirmed by the preparatory sketches and documents of Hermann Rorschach, which today can be seen at the H. Rorschach Archives and Museum in Bern (Switzerland). Exner’s research has evidenced the notion that the Rorschach is a perceptive-cognitive-projective test.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document