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Explore indexed PubMed citations for clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health research. Read source abstracts and follow each citation to its original PubMed record.

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At least 847 records · Page 47Linked to original sources

PubMed2000

Overview of the Internet and prostate cancer resources.

The hallmark of the age of personal computers is the ability to obtain information and communicate with others on nearly any subject using a computer connected to the global network known as the Internet. Information on many diseases is available on the World Wide Web. Information on prostate cancer, including its characteristics, diagnosis, and treatment, is abundantly present on the Internet. This article provides an overview of Internet prostate cancer resources, presenting a brief history of the Internet and its ubiquitous application, the World Wide Web, with a discussion of search engines, the utilization of web resources by physicians (including evaluating web sites, and a highly selected list of noteworthy sites), and the growing use of electronic mail (e-mail) in the patient-physician relationship.

Humans↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Quality of breast cancer sites on the World Wide Web.

The Internet is a powerful tool for accessing information about complex health topics. The purpose of this study was to evaluate breast cancer Internet sites using published criteria about website structure. Two searches were undertaken (November 1998 and June 1999) using the Yahoo search engine, providing a sample of 136 unique addresses. The results showed 1) owner's credentials were identified in 31.6% of sites, 2) financial charges were stated in 10.3% of sites, 3) less than 14.0% identified site creation date, 4) 33.1% identified content posting update, 5) 30.1% identified information sources, and 6) just under 88% of sites provided e-mail interactivity. The results indicate variability in breast cancer Internet sites with respect to framework criteria of accountability. We suggest that websites that lack fundamental indicators (such as dating and sources) do not provide the user with fundamental information that could enable informed decision making about site quality.

Breast Neoplasms↗

PubMed2000

[It's easy to search medical information on the Internet. How to search--step by step].

To achieve an evidence-based clinical practice it is vital to be able to rapidly access valid, relevant and updated information. Systematic reviews, HTA-reports and health economic evaluations are most easily found in the Cochrane Library, available by subscription on the web. The continually updated "Clinical Evidence" covers many clinical fields. A search on Medline will mostly yield primary research but also systematic reviews. Search-engines such as SUMSearch and TRIP could be useful by scanning multiple databases relevant to evidence-based medicine.

Databases, Bibliographic↗

PubMed2000

The French Virtual Medical University.

This paper is the description of a French Virtual Medical University based on the federation of existing or currently being developed resources in several Medical Schools in France. The objectives of the project is not only to share experiences across the country but also to integrate several resources using the New Information and Communication Technologies to support new pedagogical approaches for medical students and also for continuing medical education. The project includes: A virtual Medical Campus using secure access from several sites, The Integration of new interactive resources based on pedagogical methods, Implementation of new indexing and search engines based on medical vocabularies and ontologies, The definition of general and specific portals, the evaluation of the system for ergonomics and contents.

Computer-Assisted Instruction↗

PubMed2001

Information about age-related macular degeneration on the Internet.

BACKGROUND: A great deal of health information has become available on the Internet over the past several years. Some of this information is inaccurate or misleading to patients. We attempted to determine the accuracy of information on the Internet concerning age-related macular degeneration (ARMD). METHODS: The term "macular degeneration" was entered in each of seven Internet search engines, and the subsequent links were followed and categorized. The number of sites that discussed treatment inconsistent with the peer-reviewed standard of care for ARMD was tabulated. RESULTS: Of the 80 unique sites regarding ARMD that we identified, 17 (21%) featured nonconventional information. CONCLUSIONS: Many Internet sites feature unproven and costly nonconventional information about ARMD. Each physician should be prepared to address these sites and to suggest reliable sites concerning health information on the Internet.

Complementary Therapies↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Are infra-inguinal angioplasty and surgery comparable?

PURPOSE: The indications for Percutaneous Transluminal Angioplasty (PTA) in the treatment of infrainguinal peripheral arterial occlusive disease are controversial. We have attempted to provide up to date data and compare the techniques of both conservative management and surgical approaches. REVIEW UNDERTAKEN: A literature review was undertaken after using the Medline database and an Ovid-based search engine on the Internet. The most recent reviews, meta-analyses and studies contributing the highest levels of evidence available were reviewed and cross-referenced. EVIDENCE: The suitability of femoropopliteal disease for treatment with PTA depends on the severity of the patient's presentation and the extent of disease. Given the optimal pattern of disease, PTA can have equivalent initial technical success and medium term patency rates with the obvious advantages of lower in-hospital mortality, shorter hospital stay and lower inpatient costs. However, PTA has a higher secondary procedure rate and this negates many of the perceived benefits. In critical limb ischaemia (CLI) many lesions are unsuitable for PTA and require surgical procedures for limb salvage. Patients selected for the trials are often not from strictly stratified groups. These selection biases often interfere with direct comparison between the two techniques in all but a few prospective randomised-control studies. CONCLUSIONS: There is still a lack of high level evidence to draw a consensus on the place for PTA in femoropopliteal occlusive disease. It is apparent that the most appropriate lesions make up only a small percentage of patient presentations. When limb salvage is required it is often a situation only amenable to surgical bypass and this is why the two techniques are not easily comparable.

Angioplasty, Balloon↗

PubMed2001

Electronic prescribing in ambulatory practice: promises, pitfalls, and potential solutions.

OBJECTIVE: To examine advantages of and obstacles to electronic prescribing in the ambulatory care environment. DATA SOURCES: MEDLINE and International Pharmaceutical Abstract searches were conducted for the period from January 1980 to September 2000. Key words were electronic prescribing, computerized physician order entry, prior authorization, drug utilization review, and consumer satisfaction. In September 2000, a public search engine (www.google.com) was used to find additional technical information. In addition, pertinent articles were cross-referenced to identify other resources. DATA EXTRACTION: Articles, symposia proceedings, and organizational position statements published in the United States on electronic prescribing and automation in healthcare are cited. DATA SYNTHESIS: Electronic prescribing can eliminate the time gap between point of care and point of service, reduce medication errors, improve quality of care, and increase patient satisfaction. Considerable funding requirements, segmentation of healthcare markets, lack of technology standardization, providers' resistance to change, and regulatory indecisiveness create boundaries to the widespread use of automated prescribing. The potential solutions include establishing a standardizing warehouse or a router and gaining stakeholder support in implementation of the technology. CONCLUSIONS: Electronic prescribing can provide immense benefits to healthcare providers, patients, and managed care. Resolution of several obstacles that limit feasibility of this technology will determine its future.

Ambulatory Care Information Systems↗

PubMed2001

Is current information available useful for patients and their families?

Internet has recently evolved as a versatile and influential repository of information including those pertaining to neurosurgery. This study was undertaken to find out whether there is good quality information currently available on the Internet for neurosurgery patients and their families. We surveyed the World Wide Web (www) for information on 5 neurosurgery-terms: pallidotomy, lumbar discectomy, hydrocephlus, glioma and carotid artery aneurysm. We searched the www using Google search-engine for documents related to each of the above terms and then assessed the information contained in the first 30-hits for each term using a simple 4-point grading system. Our study suggests that there is generally a good quantity of good quality information on the Internet for neurosurgery patients and their families. Internet provides an opportunity for patient associations and professional bodies to collaborate to create useful databases to help neurosurgery patients and their relatives.

Humans↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Melatonin, light therapy, and jet lag.

If you enter the words jet lag into your Internet search engine, multiple sites come up. Jet lag is a term common to all travelers, but what is it? The medication melatonin, available in most convenience stores, is marketed as a sleep agent or treatment for jet lag, but is it safe? Is it a sleeping pill? How is light therapy related to melatonin?

Humans↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Navigation in medical Internet image databases.

The world wide web (WWW) changes common ideas of database access. Hypertext Markup Language allows the simultaneous presentation of information from different sources such as static pages, results of queries from) databases or dynamically generated pages. 'Therefore, the metaphor of the WWW itself as a database was proposed by Mendelzon and Nlilo in 1998. Against this background the techniques of navigation within WWW-databases and the semantic types of their queries has e been analysed. Forty eight image repositories of different types and content, but all concerning medical essence, have been found by search-engines. Many different techniques are offered to enable navigation ranging from simple HTML-link-lists to complex applets. The applets in particular promise an improvement for navigation. Within the meta-information for querying, only ACR- and UMLS-encoding were found, but not standardized vocabularies like ICD10 or Terminologia Anatomica. UMLS especially shows that a well defined thesaurus can improve navigation. However, of the analysed databases only the UMLS 'metathesaurus' is currently implemented without providing additional navigation support based on the UMLS 'semantic network'. Including the information about relationships between the concepts of the metathesaurus or using the UMLS semantic network could provide a much easier navigation within a network of concepts pointing to multimedia files stored somewhere in the WWW.

Anatomy, Cross-Sectional↗

PubMed2001

Indexing medical WWW documents by morphemes.

Assisting users to search medical information on the WWW is here considered from two perspectives--the linguistic complexity of medical terms, nominal compounds in particular, and cross-lingual relationships between monolingual medical terminologies. In order to solve the first problem, we present an approach to automatic indexing in which medically plausible morphological units are used. Semantic value is added to these index terms by a compact domain-specific thesaurus. We further discuss tools for morphological segmentation and morphosemantic normalization of HTML documents, as well as an adaptation of a standard WWW search engine for morpheme-based retrieval. The second problem, cross-lingual medical document retrieval, is dealt with by defining cross-lingual equivalence relations on the emerging morpheme sets.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

PubMed2001

The accessibility of computer-based health information for patients: kiosks and the web.

The Internet is a rich source of health information but it is not as accessible as many claim. This paper brings together three projects to illustrate technical and cost barriers and some options to overcome them. (1) A survey amongst a representative sample of 180 patients in rural Spain showed a marked age gradient in computer access. None over the age of 50 had, and less than 10% planned, access to the Internet whereas a quarter were prepared to use health centre based touchscreen kiosks. (2) Half the commonly used search engines did not include the two most relevant websites for Glasgow colorectal cancer patients in the first ten documents listed, showing the difficulty facing patients in finding relevant information. Selection of information would help patients avoid being overwhelmed with information. (3) One method to improve accessibility is to download websites to kiosks but two projects showed that considerable work is required to reformat the information. Public access computing, such as kiosks, could help make the Internet more accessible. We discuss whether Web sites which structure their information according to method of access, place and person provide a way forward.

Age Factors↗

PubMed2000

MIAX: a system for assessment of macromolecular interaction. 3) A parallel hybrid GA for flexible protein docking.

We propose a parallel hybrid genetic algorithm for flexible protein-protein docking in order to improve the conventional rigid-body models to manipulate protein-protein interactions. The proposed hybrid algorithm is a combination of an evolutionary algorithm with a simulated annealing one, yielding a powerful protein-complex conformation-searching engine. Parallelization of the procedure makes possible to reach high algorithm performance, in both, execution times and size of treated monomers and complexes. Knowledge on side chain flexibility is extracted by means of an exhaustive analysis of crystallographic data on proteins and protein complexes. Results demonstrate the competency of the algorithm since comparison of calculated and crystallographic data accounts for a maximum of 2.5A in RMS difference, including side chain conformation. The system allows routine analysis of this fundamental molecular biology problem important to elucidate bio-macromolecular function in biophysical and biochemical mechanisms involving molecular recognition and interaction, yielding simultaneously clues for designing new proteins and enzymes directed to different purposes.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2002

Cost-effectiveness of a modified care protocol substituting bladder tumor markers for cystoscopy for the followup of patients with transitional cell carcinoma of the bladder: a decision analytical approach.

PURPOSE: Decision analysis models were established to determine the cost-effectiveness of a plan alternating a bladder tumor marker with cystoscopy and cytology at 3-months intervals or modified care versus followup cystoscopy and cytology every 3 months or standard care. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We performed a comprehensive literature review for bladder tumor markers using 1966 to current MEDLINE data and other search engines. Statistical performance data on tumor markers were calculated by hierarchical Bayes meta-analysis with 95% confidence intervals used for the model. Other basic assumptions included cost data on tumor markers, cytology, cystoscopy, transurethral bladder resection and cystectomy as well as recurrence and progression rates from the literature. Decision trees were built with computer software using a 12 and a 24-month model with linear recurrence and progression rate assumptions. RESULTS: Overall specificity for common tumor markers was 73% to 90% and sensitivity was 49% to 77%. As expected, sensitivity increased for higher disease grades and stages. The modified care protocol was more cost-effective than standard care for the 1 and 2-year followups. On 1-year 1-way sensitivity analysis for cost only tumor marker cost, recurrence and progression rates achieved a threshold at which the modified care protocol was as or more expensive as standard care. Modified care was more cost-effective at a tumor marker cost of less than $264. On 2-way sensitivity analysis there was no significant impact of parameters at a wide range of tumor marker costs, recurrence and progression rates. CONCLUSIONS: Using a modified followup protocol in transitional cell carcinoma cases with an initial tumor occurrence using a urine based tumor marker alternating with cystoscopy and/or cytology is cost-effective for a wide range of marker sensitivities, specificities and costs, cystoscopy and/or cytology cost, a 20% to 80% yearly recurrence and a 2% to 40% yearly progression rate. This protocol should be evaluated in a prospective randomized trial to determine whether the financial and emotional benefits outweigh any potential drawbacks.

Biomarkers, Tumor↗

PubMed2001

[The establishment of an electronic reproductive health surveillance system (ERHSS)].

OBJECTIVE: To establish an electronic reproductive health surveillance system (ERHSS) and a population-based, computerized monitoring and management information system. METHODS: The ERHSS was designed based on the existing perinatal health care (PHC) surveillance, birth defects (BD) surveillance and child health care (CHC) surveillance systems. Advanced computing and network techniques were adopted in designing and developing this system. The use of information technology (IT) and its products has become popular in public health surveillance. RESULTS: The ERHSS was developed by National Center for Maternal and Infant Health (NCMIH) and Beijing InfoUnit Technological Corporation. It consists of four main components: (1) The establishment of electronic data collection system, including the electronic forms and the screening system for high risk factors; (2) The established electronic data transmission system; (3) The established electronic information reporting system; (4) The established back-up system, including card making system, ID search engine and maintenance, etc. CONCLUSION: It is the first time this population-based electronic surveillance system being developed in China. It has many features regarding accuracy, security, smooth operation, optimal performance of real-time data processing, etc. The ERHSS has been set up in 22 counties/cities in China since 1999.

Female↗

PubMed2002

Managing schizophrenia during the stable phase: is there consensus among practice guidelines?

METHOD: We performed a literature search using Medline and Psycinfo databases and Google Internet search engine. RESULTS: We identified 6 clinical practice guidelines (CPGs). All stress the need for antipsychotic therapy and psychosocial interventions. Differences lie in types of antipsychotics recommended, duration of antipsychotic trial, management of extrapyramidal symptoms, and types of psychosocial interventions. Areas poorly addressed by all guidelines include definition of the stable phase of schizophrenia, management of adverse effects with atypical agents, management of clozapine nonresponders, and management of personality issues. CONCLUSION: Published CPGs are helpful in the management of the stable phase of schizophrenia, although no single CPG series appears to address all treatment needs faced by practising clinicians.

Decision Making↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Details on demand: consumers, cancer information, and the Internet.

An increasing number of patients and their families have Internet access and use it to make sense of their cancer experience. Search engines and subject guides take Internet users to cancer-related Web sites that contain information of varying quality and accuracy. Several organizations have attempted to create evaluation tools for cancer information on the Internet. They are, for the most part, untested, but they can serve as a practical guide for coaching patients and family members on the use of the Internet. Evaluating Internet information with guidelines, dealing with Internet-savvy patients and families, and the use of e-mail in clinical practice are discussed.

Access to Information↗

PubMed1999

Internet resources for dentistry: utilization of the Internet to support professional growth, decision making, and patient care.

The use of computers as an information resource in dentistry has grown dramatically over the past ten years. Fueled by the availability of more powerful computers, societal acceptance of computer-based resources, and the development of the Internet, millions of documents now provide a tremendously important repository of information for healthcare providers. Those involved in delivery of dental care need to know how to access and use this information for their professional development and to support clinically related activities. This paper presents issues related to the use of the Internet. It also provides information on the use of search engines to find resources (websites) on the Internet and descriptions of some available resources of interest to those involved in oral healthcare.

Decision Making↗