T STURMER

..To study the relation between measures of personality and risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer in a large cohort...

..Although a great majority of antibiotics are prescribed outside hospitals, little is known about the prevalence and determinants of antibiotic resistance in the general population...

..Our program will strongly facilitate assessing the benefits of matching and flexible matching strategies in case-control studies addressing multiplicative interactions, including gene-environment interactions...

..26, 1.68). In this setting, analytic strategies using EPS or disease risk scores were not generally superior to "conventional" models. Various ways to use EPS and disease risk scores behaved differently with smaller study size...

..The severity of pain from musculoskeletal disorders might be associated with high sensitivity C reactive protein (hsCRP), a sensitive marker of low grade systemic inflammation...

..66, 0.71). Application of PSC resulted in a more plausible hazard ratio of 1.06 (95% CI: 1.00, 1.12). Until the validity and limitations of PSC have been assessed in different settings, the method should be seen as a sensitivity analysis...

..We now present a method and a computer program to calculate power and relative efficiency compared to an unmatched design varying the proportion of the matching factor in controls over all possible values from 0 to 100 percent...

..In the presence of effect-measure modification, different analytic approaches produce different summary estimates...

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..Such analyses have been proposed to address confounding by indication, but there is little empirical evidence that they achieve better control than conventional multivariate outcome modeling...

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..Although osteoarthritis (OA) is thought to derive from defective chondrocyte metabolism and thus inherently lack the large scale systemic response of rheumatoid arthritis, there is increasing interest in the acute phase proteins in OA...

..When surrogacy holds, PSC is a useful approach to adjust for unmeasured confounding using validation data...

..Increasing validity based on PS trimming may be a unique advantage of PS's over conventional outcome models...

..Nonexperimental studies of drug effects in large automated databases can provide timely assessment of real-life drug use, but are prone to confounding by variables that are not contained in these databases and thus cannot be controlled...

..7; 95% CI: 0.3-1.7) nor generalized OA (OR = 1.1; 95% CI: 0.6-2.1) was observed. Obesity seems to be a mechanical rather than a systemic risk factor for OA with the knee joint being especially susceptible...

..Repeated offers of screening examinations could provide substantial additional benefit with the levels of compliance to be expected in practice, but they would have to be weighed against the increased risks and costs...

..It might be worthwhile to evaluate the optimum degree of matching for specific settings in the design of case-control studies...

..Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) may interfere with renal function, but little is known about the effects of the half-life of these agents, or the use of other medications, on renal function...

..The aim of this study was to assess the long term risk of clinically manifest colorectal cancer among subjects with negative findings at colonoscopy...

..Such monitoring would help identify relevant factors that contribute to the spread of resistant pathogens and would support the prudent use of antibiotics...

..Despite recent advances regarding the role of diabetes with respect to cartilage metabolism, epidemiologic data to quantify the role of diabetes in the development of osteoarthritis (OA) are sparse...

..However, some differences exist that seem to predominantly affect younger women who show a poorer QOL in certain domains...

..In our setting, Poisson regression was the most convenient approach...

..Accurate measurement of alcohol intake in epidemiological studies is crucial for valid estimation of alcohol-related effects...

..These are likely to affect access to and the provision of total hip replacement...

..Breast cancer risk associated with alcohol consumption may vary according to the alcohol dehydrogenase II polymorphism, probably due to differences in alcohol metabolism...

..The aim of this paper is to quantify the effect of matching on the efficiency of estimation and power to detect gene-environment interactions in case-control studies...

..We tested whether apparently healthy male physicians who reported analgesic use had an increased risk of subsequent hypertension...

..The goal of restricting study populations is to make patients more homogeneous regarding potential confounding factors and treatment effects and thereby achieve less biased effect estimates...

..These simulation studies and other analytical results suggest that standard model-building tools designed to create good predictive models of the exposure will not always lead to optimal PS models, particularly in small studies...

..To assess the association between serum cholesterol and osteoarthritis (OA)...

..There is substantial concern regarding the potential cardiovascular adverse effects of selective coxibs and nonselective NSAIDs, but many patients with arthritis experience important clinical benefits from these agents...

..Use of propensity scores will not correct biases from unmeasured confounders, but can aid in understanding determinants of drug use and lead to improved estimates of drug effects in some settings...

..We compared three analytic strategies to control for confounding based on measured variables: conventional multivariable, exposure propensity score (EPS), and disease risk score (DRS)...

..Little information is available on the comparative effectiveness of osteoporosis pharmacotherapies...

..We compared the gastrointestinal safety between weekly alendronate and weekly risedronate and found no important difference between new users of these agents...

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..We therefore aimed to investigate the association between neuroticism, extraversion, stressful life events and incident asthma...

..This study was undertaken to examine, in a large group of new users of coxibs and NSAIDs, the rate of cardiovascular events, their time course, and whether baseline cardiovascular risk modified the rate ratios (RRs) for future events...

..Such reporting allows the reader to assess the sensitivity of the results to model assumptions that are often not supported by strong subject-matter knowledge...

..Among men, this regimen may be almost as effective as colonoscopy, at least at previous performance levels of colonoscopy...

..We examined sources and consequences of provider delay among female breast cancer patients in a population-based study in Germany...

..To examine patterns of chronic opioid use in selected groups with arthritis and low back pain and compare them with patterns among persons with ischemic heart disease...

..Whereas previous evidence is mainly based on observations of adenoma recurrence, we aimed to assess risk of CRC occurrence according to time since polypectomy...

..Recent results from several randomized controlled trials find an increased risk of fracture with TZDs compared with other oral antidiabetic agents...

..However, this hypothesis needs to be evaluated among larger population samples...

..One reason may be that little is known about the robustness of these methods against violations of their restrictive assumptions...

..These recommendations will be disseminated widely among researchers and practicing physicians. ..

..assess the value empirical Bayes correction of the PS compared with variable selection. Dissemination of our results will increase correct application of PS methods including methods to adjust for unmeasured confounding. ..