Response shift in the assessment of quality of life among people attending cardiac rehabilitation

Objectives: To examine whether any response shift in quality of life assessment over the course of a cardiac rehabilitation programme could be explained by changes in individuals’ internal standards (recalibration), values (reprioritization) and/or conceptualization of quality of life and the extent to which any response shift could be explained by health locus of control, optimism and coping strategy. Design: Longitudinal survey design. Methods: The SEIQoL-DW was administered at the beginning and end of a cardiac rehabilitation programme. At the end of the programme, the SEIQoL-DW then-test was also administered to measure response shift. A total of 57 participants completed these measures and other measures to assess health locus of control, optimism and coping. Results: Response shift effects were observed in this population mainly due to recalibration. When response shift was incorporated into the analysis of QoL a larger treatment effect was observed. Active coping as a mechanism in the response shift model was found to have a significant positive correlation with response shift. Conclusion: This study showed that response shift occurs during cardiac rehabilitation. The occurrence of response shift in QoL ratings over time for this population could have implications for the estimation of the effectiveness of the intervention.

Influence of environmental enrichment on the behaviour, performance and meat quality of domestic pigs

Three hundred and twenty pigs were reared from birth to slaughter at 21 weeks in either barren or enriched environments. The barren environments were defined as intensive housing (slatted floors and minimum recommended space allowances) and the enriched environments incorporated extra space, an area which contained peat and straw in a rack. Behavioural observations showed that environmental enrichment reduced time spent inactive and time spent involved in harmful social and aggressive behaviour while increasing the time spent in exploratory behaviour. During the finishing period (15-21 weeks) mean daily food intakes were higher and food conversion ratios were lower for pigs in enriched environments compared with their counterparts in barren environments (P

Verteporfin Photodynamic Therapy Cohort Study Report 2: Clinical Measures of Vision and Health-Related Quality of Life

Purpose: To quantify decreases in health-related quality of life (HRQoL) for given deterioration in clinical measures of vision; to describe the shape of these relationships; and to test whether the gradients of these relationships change with duration of visual loss.

Kids’ Life and Times: using an Internet survey to measure children’s health-related quality of life

Objective
To examine the psychometric properties of an internet version of a children and young person's quality of life measure originally designed as a paper questionnaire.

Methods
Participants were 3,440 10 and 11 year old children in Northern Ireland who completed the KIDSCREEN-27 online as part of a general attitudinal survey. The questionnaire was animated using cartoon characters that are familiar to most children and the questions appeared on screen and were read aloud by actors.

Results
Exploratory principal component analysis of the online version of the questionnaire supported the existence of five components in line with the paper version. The items loaded on the components that would be expected based on previous findings with five domains - physical well-being,psychological well-being, autonomy and parents, social support and peers and school environment.Internal consistency reliability of the five domains was measured using Cronbach's alpha and the results suggested that the scale scores were reliable. The domain scores were similar to those reported in the literature for the paper version.

Conclusions
These results suggest that the factor structure and internal consistency reliability scores of the KIDSCREEN-27 embedded within an online survey are comparable to those reported in the literature for the paper version.

Performance Analysis of Novel Randomly Shifted Certification Authority Authentication Protocol for MANETs

The provision of security in mobile ad hoc networks is of paramount importance due to their wireless nature. However, when conducting research into security protocols for ad hoc networks it is necessary to consider these in the context of the overall system. For example, communicational delay associated with the underlying MAC layer needs to be taken into account. Nodes in mobile ad hoc networks must strictly obey the rules of the underlying MAC when transmitting security-related messages while still maintaining a certain quality of service. In this paper a novel authentication protocol, RASCAAL, is described and its performance is analysed by investigating both the communicational-related effects of the underlying IEEE 802.11 MAC and the computational-related effects of the cryptographic algorithms employed. To the best of the authors' knowledge, RASCAAL is the first authentication protocol which proposes the concept of dynamically formed short-lived random clusters with no prior knowledge of the cluster head. The performance analysis demonstrates that the communication losses outweigh the computation losses with respect to energy and delay. MAC-related communicational effects account for 99% of the total delay and total energy consumption incurred by the RASCAAL protocol. The results also show that a saving in communicational energy of up to 12.5% can be achieved by changing the status of the wireless nodes during the course of operation. Copyright (C) 2009 G. A. Safdar and M. P. O'Neill (nee McLoone).