Isabel Elaine Allen

UCSF University of California, San Francisco | UCSF

"Going the Distance: Online Education in the United States, 2011" is the ninth annual report on the state of online learning in U.S. higher education. The survey is designed, administered and analyzed by the Babson Survey Research Group. Data collection is conducted in partnership with the College Board. This year's study, like those for the previo...

Numerous studies have evaluated the impacts of community housing models on outcomes of persons with severe mental illness. The authors conducted a meta-analysis of 44 unique housing alternatives described in 30 studies, which they categorized as residential care and treatment, residential continuum, permanent supported housing, and nonmodel housing...

The objective was to assess the efficacy and safety of erythropoiesis-stimulating proteins (ESPs) in anemia of myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS). A systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted covering English-language studies published from 1980 to December 2005. Fifty-nine studies qualified: five controlled trials (n = 354), all epoetin versus...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the trends in the growth of online learning since 2002 and the change in the opinions and strategies of chief academic officers. Design/methodology/approach – Annual surveys of chief academic officers from 2002‐2006 are summarized. Findings – The paper finds that online courses and programs contin...

"Blending In: The Extent and Promise of Blended Education in the United States" builds on the series of annual reports on the state of online education in U.S. Higher Education. This study, like the previous reports, is aimed at answering some of the fundamental questions about the nature and extent of education in the United States. Unlike the pre...

There is increased interest in quantitative ultrasound for osteoporosis screening because it predicts fracture risk, is portable, and is relatively inexpensive. However, there is no consensus regarding its accuracy for identifying patients with osteoporosis. To determine the sensitivity and specificity of calcaneal quantitative ultrasound for ident...

Erythropoiesis-stimulating proteins (ESPs) are indicated for the treatment of chemotherapy-induced anemia (CIA). Evidence-based guidelines and systematic reviews of the management of CIA do not yet include all currently approved ESPs or all of the clinically relevant benefits and risks of ESPs. The aims of this work were to provide up-to-date asses...

Few studies have sought to determine which specific supported employment services improve employment outcomes for people with pyschiatric disabilities. This study examined the effects of job development and job support among other services on acquisition and retention of competitive employment. Data used in the analysis came from seven sites of the...

This five-site study compared Medicaid managed behavioral health programs and fee-for-service programs on use and quality of services, satisfaction, and symptoms and functioning of adults with serious mental illness. Adults with serious mental illness in managed care programs (N=958) and fee-for-service programs (N=1,011) in five states were interv...

A meta-analysis was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of client-clinician matching on the basis of race-ethnicity on overall functioning, service retention, and total number of sessions attended for African American and Caucasian American adult populations in mental health services. The analysis included 10 published and unpublished studies b...

Service fit, defined as consistency between mental health services judged needed and services received was measured for a random sample of service recipients in a public mental health system (N = 6588). A variant of small area analysis was used to measure the relationship between catchment area mortality rates from natural causes, suicide, and medi...

OBJECTIVES: Health care decision-makers need more head-to-head drug comparison trials. Industry rarely sponsors such studies, preferring placebo comparators. We present an example of using meta-analysis for an indirect comparison of 2 drugs, with the results subsequently validated in a direct comparison trial. METHODS: The drugs for comparison were...

The authors wanted to determine whether adding interferon-alpha (IFN-alpha) to chemotherapy regimens, in either induction or maintenance settings, provides additional survival benefits in follicular non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). A meta-analysis was performed based on published data from randomized controlled clinical trials involving nine separate...

To establish the evidence base for the diagnosis of sleep apnea (SA) in adult patients, a systematic review of the literature from 1980 through November 1, 1997 was performed. Diagnostic studies were included if they reported results of any test to establish or support a diagnosis of SA, in comparison to a diagnosis from a full polysomnogram (PSG)....

To replicate and to critique a recently published meta-analysis[1] of the incidence of nonpreventable serious and fatal adverse drug reactions (ADRs) in hospitalized patients, to better understand its results and conclusions. The published methods described in the meta-analysis of Lazarou and colleagues were followed.[1] This meta-analysis reviewed...

A systematic review and economic analysis of clinical trials evaluating the effect of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) on dental outcomes in postmenopausal women were conducted. Twenty published studies involving more than 13,735 postmenopausal women were summarized and analyzed. In prospective studies, the effect of HRT on osteoporosis (OP) has b...

To determine the risk of cardiovascular events and death in patients receiving statin treatment for cholesterol regulation. Systematic review and meta-analysis of all randomized controlled trials that were published as of April 15, 1997. Primary or secondary prevention trials or regression trials were eligible. All-cause mortality, fatal myocardial...

A meta-analysis was performed to compare the risk of serious adverse events associated with the use of all formulations of isradipine, when used as monotherapy in hypertension, to active drug or placebo controls. Eligible studies totalled 65 published and unpublished randomised controlled trials involving 9903 subjects and 10,675 treatment exposure...

Studies of monoclonal antibody-based imaging agents show that blood clearance is inversely proportional to molecular size, i.e., Fab or Fab' > F(ab')2 > IgG. Indium-111-antimyosin Fab-DTPA is a highly specific and sensitive marker for myocardial necrosis. An improvement on current antibody diagnostic imaging may result from the use of smaller label...

Gram-negative sepsis is caused by endotoxin-induced release of tumor necrosis factor (TNF) and other cytokines. HA-1A is a human monoclonal antibody that binds specifically to endotoxin. HA-1A should prevent death in endotoxemic patients and reduce serum levelsofTNF and interleukin-6 (lL-6). This hypothesis was tested in 82 septic patients who were...

In this study, limited sampling models for HA-1A human IgM monoclonal antibody were developed to predict the area under the concentration time curve from timed serum concentrations. Patients were administered 15 minute infusions of 25 mg (11 patients), 100 mg (15 patients), and 250 mg (2 patients). A detailed pharmacokinetic analysis (eight time po...

The antihypertensive efficacy and safety of indoramin, an alpha 1-adrenergic antagonist, were evaluated in 215 elderly patients. Data were collected from patients aged 60 years and older who were treated under similar protocols with indoramin administered alone (n = 58) or in combination with a thiazide diuretic (n = 157). After at least 6 months o...

To the Editor: The number of meta-analyses in the health sciences has been dramatically increasing. By 1996, approximately 300 meta-analyses in medicine had been published,1 and in 1997, this number had increased to more than 400 (Bruce Kupelnick, written communication, August 1998). The movement toward evidence-based medicine suggests that these n...

Human leukemia mortality rates for 43 urban populations (cities) of the United States, 1957-1964, were analyzed against several environmental variables using mean annual rates per 100,000 persons for all ages, and for two age subsets. One subset involves rates for persons 25 years. Among environmental variables examined were natural background leve...