Qualification as surrogate endpoints requires significant resources and will, in many cases, only be possible in a concerted effort of academia, industry and regulatory authorities, as proposed for example by the Biomarkers Consortium (http://www.biomarkersconsortium.org), a public-private partnership managed by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health in the USA.
To minimize errors in blood pressure measurement, standardized measurement protocols have been proposed, for example by the European Society of Hypertension [ 11] and the American Heart Association [ 26].
To realise the study aims, a multi-perspective, longitudinal qualitative design was chosen referring to grounded theory [ 24, 25] and narrative research strategies [ 26, 27], as proposed for example by Charmaz [ 28].
This research tested varying definitions in the assessment of an EMR standard for diabetes diagnosis, some established (for example, the Ontario Diabetes Database definition) and some proposed (for example, the BDDI established by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care).
He makes politics and government look easier than they are by proposing, for example, that business can be neatly divided into productive and blood-sucking categories.
A 20 July version of the guidelines obtained by Science proposes, for example, that missions approach Apollo landing sites and artifacts at a tangent to avoid crashing into them.
The asymptotic value of the critical velocity resulting by mathematical modelling is in good agreement with those proposed by other authors, for example by means of complex CFD (computational fluid dynamics) studies.
Conversely, it has been proposed that, upon DNA damage (for example, by telomere dysfunction), p53 promotes aging through the repression of PGC-1α and PGC-1β, resulting in mitochondrial dysfunction.
We should mention that methods other than cost-benefit or cost-utility analysis have been proposed for choosing between alternatives – for example, by aggregating mean preferences across different attributes (outcomes) of the decision – so called multi-criteria decision-making [ 36, 37].
It has been proposed that DR prolonged lifespan for example by attenuating oxidative damage, reducing production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), increasing DNA repair capacity, altering the growth hormone/IGF-1 axis, decreasing signaling through the mTOR substrate S6K1 or improving hormesis [ 4- 8].
Clearly, if our aim is to attach biological meaning to our results (for example, by proposing putative pathways), then we need to have some degree of confidence that any conclusions we make are robust to the uncertainty in the data.
