The UK National Screening Committee (NSC) defines screening as a way of identifying people who are apparently healthy but may be at higher risk of a disease.[3] Effective screening can help to prevent deaths, disabilities and improve quality of life.[2] In addition, where the opportunity SB431542 manufacturer cost of providing screening is balanced by costs avoided in future health care, screening can also indirectly contribute to improving the economy of both individuals and society. However, a systematic review conducted by Jepson et al. in 2000[4] demonstrated that uptake of screening varied across different screening programmes and was influenced by a variety of patient characteristics including

gender, age and education. It reported that interventions that could potentially increase uptake included those that removed financial barriers.

Interventions that provided opportunistic screening were also found to increase uptake in some studies.[5-7] In most countries worldwide, community pharmacies are generally easily accessible; they are distributed throughout rural and urban locations and people do not usually have to book an appointment to visit the pharmacist. In the UK, for example, around 90% of the population visits a community pharmacy at least once each year.[8] Internationally, people are being encouraged see more to go to their community pharmacist for health advice.[9-11] Pharmacists already respond to their customers’ requests, advising on treatment of symptoms and providing health promotion advice.[12] Furthermore, community pharmacies are recognised locations where people seek help for the management of minor illnesses, the symptoms of which can often resemble early signs of some of the NCDs mentioned above. For these reasons, community pharmacies may be suitable settings for provision of screening programmes to facilitate earlier diagnosis of previously unrecognised conditions, or identification of risk factors for major diseases, especially opportunistic screening services. The aim of this systematic review was to assess the published evidence about community pharmacy-based screening

interventions for detection of major diseases in community pharmacy users. The objectives were: (1)  To identify and summarise the main components of community pharmacy-based screening interventions. Published Rolziracetam reports of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of community pharmacy-based interventions are limited in number,[13] an observation that was confirmed by an initial scoping search. The current systematic review, therefore, considered all possible study designs including RCTs, quasi-experimental studies and observational studies. Study participants could include any user of community pharmacies irrespective of age, race, gender and health status. Any community pharmacy-based screening intervention that aimed to identify people with, or at risk from, a major disease was considered for inclusion.

To assess whether there is indeed evidence for global endogenous saccadic facilitation in PD, we used the same dual task paradigm to measure voluntary saccade production PF-562271 with and without a perceptual discrimination task. The PD and control subjects that comprised the groups in the earlier report (van Stockum et al., 2011b) [20 PD patients (eight females) and 20 control participants (eight females)] performed the

voluntary saccade tasks. The groups were matched for mean age and years of education. Mean age in the PD group was 65.0 years, ranging from 50 to 77. In the control group the mean age was 65.5 years, ranging from 56 to 76. Hoehn & Yahr scores in the PD group ranged from 1 to 3. To exclude subjects with dementia, only participants who scored 25 or more on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (Nasreddine

et al., 2005; Dalrymple-Alford et al., 2010) were included. The Movement Disorder Society-sponsored revision of the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) was used http://www.selleckchem.com/products/cx-5461.html to assess motor impairment in the PD group (Goetz et al., 2008). The participants in the PD group were tested ‘on’ medication; see Table 1 for demographic details of the PD group. This project received ethical approval from the Upper South A Regional Ethics Committee of the New Zealand Ministry of Health and participants gave informed consent. The paradigm was adapted from Deubel (2008), with saccades performed with and without a concurrent two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) perceptual discrimination task (van Stockum et al., 2011b). Four potential saccade targets were displayed throughout each trial and the onset Methocarbamol of a central arrow cue indicated which of the four was the saccade target. This procedure ensured that the task elicited voluntary saccades (the saccade target was not exogenously determined by the appearance of a peripheral visual stimulus), without the need to suppress

a reflexive saccade. The 2AFC discrimination task required participants to report the identity of a symbol (E or 3), which appeared for 100 ms at the target location shortly (the stimulus onset asynchrony or SOA) after the onset of the arrow cue. The SOA and the duration of the discrimination symbol were such that the discrimination symbol generally disappeared before saccade onset and therefore the E or 3 was not foveated directly. Exactly the same trials were presented (albeit in a different order) for the saccade task ‘without discrimination’ and the saccade task ‘with discrimination’. Only the instructions to the participants differed: in the task ‘without discrimination’, participants were instructed simply to ‘look at the target indicated by the arrow as quickly and accurately as possible’ and to ignore any flickers they might notice in the display, as they were irrelevant to the task.