The gold standard for ascertaining whether non-human cells are pluripotent involves injecting them into blastocyst-stage embryos.
Because a population-based cancer registry is the "gold standard" for ascertaining the number of cancer cases that develops within a population, it is very difficult to evaluate if this ascertainment is complete.
A further limitation is that we did not have the facilities in a community-based study to undertake hyperinsulinaemic euglycaemic clamp experiments, which are the 'gold standard' for ascertaining IR levels [ 22].
Instead, the standard method for ascertaining whether putative hESCs are truly pluripotent is to inject them into postnatal, immune-deficient mice, and see whether they give rise to teratomas (tumors that consist of disorganized tissue growth of the three embryonic germ layers, endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm).
The International Study of Allergies and Asthma in Childhood (ISAAC) questionnaire is the current gold standard for ascertaining asthma outcomes in epidemiologic studies [ 1].
The largest methodological problem in studying osteoarthritis related pain may be the lack of a validated gold standard for ascertaining that the hip pain is due to osteoarthritis.
Second, associations between pre-transport variables and adverse outcomes could not be determined, both because pre-transport status was poorly documented, and because studies lacked standard definitions and methods for ascertaining adverse events.
As with most studies based on SEER-Medicare, Medicare claims, or other sources of administrative and claims data, we did not include a "true gold standard" with perfect sensitivity and specificity for ascertaining the prevalences and incidences of the conditions.
The study explores the diagnostic accuracy of WHO revised verbal autopsy tool for ascertaining the causes of neonatal deaths against reference standard diagnosis obtained from standardized clinical and supportive hospital data.
Data is just one tool for ascertaining what works.
