Amelioration of Neurosensory Structure and Function in Animal and Cellular Models of a Congenital Blindness

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Self-care in Heart Failure Hospital Discharge Instructions—Differences Between Nurse Practitioner and Physician Providers

Patients with heart failure (HF) are at risk for frequent readmission potentially due to self-care deficits. Medical doctors (MDs) and nurse practitioners (NPs) both provide discharge instructions. However, each type of provider may emphasize different elements of care. The aim of this study was to analyze and compare the content of the documentation of 50 discharge instructions of heart failure patients written by NPs and MDs. Compared with MDs, NPs placed greater emphasis on symptom identification, and were more likely to advise and schedule follow-up appointments with primary care and cardiology providers rather than advising an appointment was needed without scheduling one.     

State selection in Markov models for panel data with application to psoriatic arthritis

Markov multistate models in continuous‐time are commonly used to understand the progression over time of disease or the effect of treatments and covariates on patient outcomes. The states in multistate models are related to categorisations of the disease status, but there is often uncertainty about the number of categories to use and how to define them. Many categorisations, and therefore multistate models with different states, may be possible. Different multistate models can show differences in the effects of covariates or in the time to events, such as death, hospitalisation, or disease progression. Furthermore, different categorisations contain different quantities of information, so that the corresponding likelihoods are on different scales, and standard, likelihood‐based model comparison is not applicable. We adapt a recently developed modification of Akaike's criterion, and a cross‐validatory criterion, to compare the predictive ability of multistate models on the information which they share. All the models we consider are fitted to data consisting of observations of the process at arbitrary times, often called ‘panel’ data. We develop an implementation of these criteria through Hidden Markov models and apply them to the comparison of multistate models for the Health Assessment Questionnaire score in psoriatic arthritis. This procedure is straightforward to implement in the R package ‘msm’. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.