5,008,027 papers found

Plants depend heavily on soil nutrients for growth, development and defence. Nutrient availability is crucial not only for sustaining vital biochemical processes but also for mounting effective defences against a diverse array of pathogens. Macronutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium significantly influen…

Over the past two decades biologic therapies have seen a rapid uptake in the management of ocular inflammation. Peripheral ulcerative keratitis (PUK), once a harbinger of blindness and mortality in refractory rheumatological disease, is now increasingly being treated with these agents. We conducted a review to evaluate…

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: To define recent changes and future directions in the practice of pancreas transplantation (PT). Two major events have occurred in the past 18 months: COVID-19 pandemic, and the first world consensus conference on PT. Several innovative studies were published after the consensus conference. R…

Despite the lack of evidence that the 'putative human pheromones' androstadienone and estratetraenol ever were pheromones, almost 60 studies have claimed 'significant' results. These are quite possibly false positives and can be best seen as potential examples of the 'reproducibility crisis', sadly common in the rest o…

BACKGROUND: Atraumatic hip pain in children is one of the most common symptoms with which pediatricians, orthopedists, and general practitioners are confronted, with an incidence of 148 cases per 100 000 persons per year. METHODS: This article is based on publications up to April 2019 that were retrieved by a selectiv…

BACKGROUND: Systematic reviews are considered the best design to synthesize all existing information of a given research topic. To date, there is no study that investigated the quality of reporting of systematic reviews relevant to physical therapy published in Portuguese. OBJECTIVE: To analyse the quality of reportin…

Randomized controlled clinical trials remain the best method for minimizing bias when evaluating dermatological treatments. Many dermatologic clinical trials have suffered from small sample sizes, selective reporting of outcomes, publication bias, poor reporting, and heterogeneous outcomes that have hampered comparabil…

Several systematic reviews (SRs) have assessed the effectiveness of t'ai chi for many conditions including hypertension, osteoarthritis and fall prevention; however, their conclusions have been contradictory. The aim of this overview was to critically evaluate the SRs of t'ai chi for any improvement of medical conditio…

Neuraxial anaesthesia is increasingly performed in thrombocytopenic patients at the time of delivery of pregnancy. There is a lack of data regarding the optimum platelet count at which spinal procedures can be safely performed. Reports are often confounded by the presence of other risk factors for spinal haematomata, s…

Coronary revascularisation using cardiopulmonary bypass remains the gold standard treatment for coronary artery disease. Over the past decade, techniques of revascularisation on the beating heart without the use of cardiopulmonary bypass (off-pump surgery) have evolved with an attempt to reduce the potential deleteriou…

The integrity and functional activity of the endothelial monolayer play a critical role in preventing atherosclerotic disease progression. Endothelial cell (EC) damage by atherosclerosis risk factors can result in EC apoptosis with loss of the integrity of the endothelium. Thus, approaches to repair the injured vessels…

Bariatric surgery for the treatment of morbid obesity or overweight refractory to medical therapy was born at the beginning of second half of the twentieth century, and its first steps were uncertain and with a not jet well definite purpose. In fact the main result to be pursued seemed to be simply the reduction of bod…

In an effort to identify priority statements for research into the healthcare of children and adolescents a search of multiple research databases and the Internet was undertaken. There is a considerable body of literature outlining research priorities that are built around specific disorders or specialist services, whi…

Online handwriting recognition is gaining renewed interest owing to the increase of pen computing applications and new pen input devices. The recognition of Chinese characters is different from western handwriting recognition and poses a special challenge. To provide an overview of the technical status and inspire futu…

There is almost universal agreement that the quality of clinical trials of acupuncture is poor. There is an urgent need to improve their quality. The author develops here a list of 45 criteria important in the design, implementation, and writing up of controlled clinical acupuncture trials. This list has been compiled…

BACKGROUND: It is difficult to determine the effectiveness or potential harm of dental therapies. Thus, any tools able to condense reliable scientific information would be of benefit. PURPOSE: To discuss methods for the assessment of the scientific literature and, in particular, of systematic reviews for evaluating th…

Evidence-based medicine is a new paradigm of clinical practice that promotes the collection, interpretation and integration of valid, important and applicable to patients research-derived evidence, and it can improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of health care. Nevertheless research often fails to get in clinic…

INTRODUCTION: The number of older patients with cancer is expected to continue to increase owing to the aging population. Recently, the usefulness of geriatric assessment (GA) conducted by multiple staff members from different medical backgrounds has been reported; however, a consensus on the effectiveness of GA has no…

BACKGROUND: To date, dozens of systematic reviews (SRs) and meta-analyses (MAs) summarize the effectiveness of preventive interventions for perinatal depression. However, the results are inconclusive, making an urgent need to step up to higher levels of evidence synthesis. AIMS: To summarize and compare the evidence f…

PURPOSE: To systematically evaluate and summarize evidence across multiple systematic reviews (SRs) examining interventions addressing polypharmacy. SUMMARY: MEDLINE, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE) were searched for SRs evaluating interventions a…