Introduction With increasing diabetes trends worldwide, morbidity, mortality and associated costs due to diabetes-related complications are a global public health concern. Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is ...

Objectives Latin American countries have long struggled with socioeconomic inequalities and health equity. In 2007, Ecuador implemented a health reform to address these issues by making public health ...

Objectives Nurses are generally present, and often influential, in supporting patient and family acceptance of medical futility and in assisting doctors in negotiating referral to palliative care. Yet ...

Objective The FOURIER trial showed a benefit of the PCSK9 inhibitor evolocumab over placebo with respect to cardiovascular outcomes in patients with cardiovascular disease. However, we observed some ...

Objective Radiotherapy (RT) can cause a range of negative impacts in addition to the intended treatment impacts. Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) may improve the physical and psychological conditions of ...

Information on the best study designs for your research, from the BMJ Open editorial team.

Objective The objective of this study was to characterise the incidence rates of herpes zoster (HZ), also known as shingles, and risk of complications across the world. Design We systematically ...

Objective Pterygium is considered to be a proliferative overgrowth of bulbar conjunctiva that can induce significant astigmatism and cause visual impairment; this is the first meta-analysis to ...

Background Studies from different Western countries have reported a rapid increase in spinal surgery rates, an increase that exceeds by far the growing incidence rates of spinal disorders in the ...

Introduction There is currently a lack of clear and accepted standards for the development (planning, requirement analysis and research, design and application testing) of apps for medical and ...

Purpose The aim of this study was to evaluate the proportion of suspected heart failure patients with significant valvular heart disease. Early diagnosis of valve disease is essential as delay can ...

Introduction Evidence from individual longitudinal studies suggests that anxiety and depression may impact quality of life. However, systematic reviews synthesising current evidence have mainly ...