In addition, according to the methods sections these participants were recruited at the same institution over the same period.
The "Booklet of Questions" filled in prior to the first physiotherapy appointment will ask each participant which of these methods the participant prefers.
Another 170 MCCS participants were matched to different VAED IDs, implying that the two linkage methods had matched these participants to different records in the VAED dataset.
In total 7% of the participants withdrew from the treatment in the trial; 3% never started working with the GSD method (2/3 of these participants stayed in the trial with data collected at all times), and during the trial 4% stopped treatment before it was completed.
These methods empower participants to record, reflect upon, and discuss the "reality of their lives" [ 27].
Although there has been a recent trend to evaluate the effectiveness of certain tracing procedures, such as between-wave mailings [ 17– 20], relatively few cohort studies formally evaluate the cost-effectiveness of such activities [ 21], or the acceptability of these methods to participants.
The majority of studies reported their method of participant recruitment; however, these participants were not commonly representative of the population from which they were recruited.
The high degree of consistency of views from these diverse methods and participants provides some confidence in the validity of the findings.
What we found was that those providers who used these methods to motivate participants to return usually only discouraged them or led the participants to seek out other providers or, in a few cases, other facilities for their care.
As described previously in the Materials and Methods, these analyses were restricted to participants who did not receive supplementation for that micronutrient.
