Secondly, besides mortality outcomes, we chose to restrict the patient-important outcomes to the post-ICU period (leaving out pain, anxiety and dyspnea which might have occurred during the ICU stay).
It is important to assess the impact of interventions that affect blood glucose control on health status besides clinical outcomes such as glycemic control [ 3].
This user-centered approach is favored in well-resourced countries where the concern – besides positive outcomes – is not so much whether people will be able to access assistive technology or not, but whether they will use or abandon the products once they have got them [ 8- 11].
However, we quickly realized that this would be difficult to document in an objective way and that besides the outcome might actually provide limited insight.
In contrast to the earlier trial (Vendittoli et al. 2010), besides functional outcome we also assessed the blood levels of cobalt and chromium for both implants with time.
Our modified informed consent procedure implies that all patients are informed about the fact that, besides the outcome assessment aiming at gaining more insight in daily symptom variations, the study has another purpose.
" 'Other outcomes' besides objective measures of disease severity may be 'more clinically relevant'?" That kind of assertion clashes with the basic truths of the scientific method.
For example, the more a learner feels autonomous, the better his or her performance is, besides other positive outcomes (see Ryan and Deci 2000, p. 63).
The diagnostic of protein-energy wasting should be done using a tool that can predict clinically important outcomes, besides identifying malnutrition.
Plus, other outcomes besides survival are important -- for example, detecting breast cancer early enough to avoid more aggressive treatments such as mastectomy or chemotherapy.
