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. 2022 Mar 23:16:818686.
doi: 10.3389/fnins.2022.818686. eCollection 2022.

Juxtaposing Medical Centers Using Different Questionnaires Through Score Predictors

Clara Puga  1 , Miro Schleicher  1 , Uli Niemann  1 , Vishnu Unnikrishnan  1 , Benjamin Boecking  2 , Petra Brueggemann  2 , Jorge Simoes  3 , Berthold Langguth  3 , Winfried Schlee  3 , Birgit Mazurek  2 , Myra Spiliopoulou  1
Affiliations

Juxtaposing Medical Centers Using Different Questionnaires Through Score Predictors

Clara Puga et al. Front Neurosci. .

Abstract

Background: Chronic tinnitus is a clinically multidimensional phenomenon that entails audiological, psychological and somatosensory components. Previous research has demonstrated age and female gender as potential risk factors, although studies to this regard are heterogeneous. Moreover, whilst recent research has begun to identify clinical "phenotypes," little is known about differences in patient population profiles at geographically separated and specialized treatment centers. Identifying such differences might prevent potential biases in joint randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and allow for population-specific treatment adaptations.

Method: Two German tinnitus treatment centers were compared regarding pre-treatment data distributions of their patient population bases. To identify overlapping as well as center-specific factors, juxtaposition-, similarity-, and meta-data-based methods were applied.

Results: Between centers, significant differences emerged. One center demonstrated some predictive power of the patients of the other center with regard to questionnaire score after treatment, indicating similarities in treatment response across center populations. Furthermore, adherence to the completion of the questionnaires was found to be an important factor in predicting post-treatment data.

Discussion: Differential age and gender distributions per center should be considered as regards RCT design and individualized treatment planning.

Keywords: adherence; networks; predictive modeling; similarity; socio-demographics; tinnitus.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Comparison of age distribution between the two clinical centers and the German population. (A) Relative frequency by age intervals for UHREG (left) and the German population (right). (B) Relative frequency by age intervals for CHA (left) and the German population (right). (C) Density distributions of age for UHREG, CHA and the German population.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Age distribution comparison between clinical centers.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Age distribution per gender and clinical center. (A) Female tinnitus patients. (B) Male tinnitus patients.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Percentage of people per gender in Germany and in each clinical center.
Figure 5
Figure 5
NetLSD distances of graphs with TQt0 per clinical center and gender.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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