Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic neurological condition that frequently compromises upper limb (UL) function. Despite its functional relevance, few instruments validated in Brazilian Portuguese are specific to this population. The Arm Function in Multiple Sclerosis Questionnaire (AMSQ) was originally developed in Dutch to measure this function in individuals with MS. To translate, cross-culturally adapt, and validate the AMSQ for Brazilian Portuguese. The study was approved by the HCPA Research Ethics Committee (CAAE: 82069424.0.0000.5327) and followed international guidelines, including translation, synthesis, back-translation, content validation and reliability. The Content Validity Index (CVI) was calculated. In the reliability stage, 50 individuals with MS answered the AMSQ at two time points, with an interval of 3-5 days. Internal consistency was assessed using Cronbach's alpha, and test-retest reproducibility was evaluated by the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC 2,1). The questionnaire was well understood by the participants, confirming its cultural appropriateness. The AMSQ-BR showed a CVI above 90% for all items and presented excellent reproducibility (ICC = 0.932) and internal consistency (α = 0.984). The Brazilian version of the AMSQ-BR is valid and reliable for the assessment of upper limb function in individuals with multiple sclerosis. It presents content validity, test-retest reproducibility, and internal consistency, making it a relevant tool for clinical and research use in the Brazilian context.

The internet is an important source of health information for the population. There is robust evidence about the efficacy of mouthwashes in the prevention and treatment of oral diseases. However, many websites containing mouthwash-related content may display misinformation and be challenging to read and understand. Thus, this study evaluates the quality of information available about mouthwashes on Brazilian websites. A total of 100 websites were evaluated across Google, Bing and Yahoo!. The websites were organised into rankings according to their order of appearance on each of the four search engines. Two independent examiners assessed the quality of the websites using the DISCERN questionnaire and the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) benchmark criteria. The readability of the sites was assessed by the Flesch Reading Ease adapted to Brazilian Portuguese (FRE-BP). The content of the websites was categorised according to the presence or absence of information relevant to the theme. Statistical analysis was performed using Spearman rank correlation coefficient, Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis test and Dunn post hoc test. A total of 32 sites were analysed. Web content was considered of poor quality by DISCERN (mean 37.46 ± 8.28) and JAMA (mean 1.37 ± 0.87) scores, presenting difficult reading levels (FRE-BP: mean 44.04 ± 9.89). The mouthwash-related content available on Brazilian websites was considered of low quality and difficult to read.

Linguistic validation and reliability of the Brazilian Portuguese version of the Composite Autonomic Symptom Score 31 (COMPASS 31).

Cross-Cultural Validation of the Brazilian-Portuguese Oral Health Impact Profile for Temporomandibular Disorders.

Mystical experiences are commonly described in the context of psychedelic use and other forms of expanded states of consciousness. Although the Mystical Orientation Scale Revised (MOSR) has been used in international studies, no Brazilian Portuguese version had beentestedto date. This exploratory study aimed to translate, culturally adapt, and examine the psychometric properties of the MOSR for the Brazilian population (MOSR-BR). The process followed international guidelines, including translation, back-translation, expert committee review, and pre-testing. The final version was applied to a sample of 505 Brazilian adults. Exploratory factor analysis supported a unidimensional structure, explaining 47.6% of the variance. The MOSR-BR showed high internal consistency (α = .95), slightly higher than the original and Italian versions. Construct validity was evidenced by significant positive correlations between MOSR-BR and all subscales of the Death Transcendence Scale, as well as with the Religious and Existential Well-Being subscales of the Spiritual Well-Being Scale. The scale also discriminated between psychedelic substance users and non-users, with higher mystical orientation scores among occasional and frequent users.This exploratory study provides preliminary evidence supporting the value of further research on the MOSR-BR to address acknowledged limitations with the pilot study, including the cross-sectional design, non-causal inferences, recruitment method and participant self-selection, limited generalizability, absence of confirmatory factor analysis and test-retest reliability, and the need for larger and more diverse samples with longitudinal reliability assessment.

We evaluated the zero-shot performance of six large language models (LLMs; GPT-4.0 Turbo, LLaMA-3-8B, LLaMA-3-70B, Mixtral 8$$\times$$7B Instruct, Titan Text G1-Express, Command R+) and four multimodal LLMs (Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Claude-3-opus, Claude-3-Sonnet, Claude-3-Haiku) on the 2023 Brazilian Portuguese medical residency entrance exam of the Hospital das Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo including text-only and image-based questions. Comparison among models showed that accuracy varied widely, with Claude-3.5-Sonnet achieving the highest score on text-only questions (70.27%, 95% CI: 65.68–74.86), surpassing GPT-4.0 Turbo (66.22%, 95% CI: 65.38–67.05), while the open-source LLaMA-3-70B performed competitively. The best models reached the median level observed among human candidates. On image-based questions, accuracy dropped substantially across models, with most scoring below 50%, except Claude-3.5-Sonnet, which maintained stable performance. However, this decline should be interpreted with caution, as it remains unclear whether it reflects multimodal reasoning limitations or differences in intrinsic question difficulty, and the present study does not allow these possibilities to be disentangled. In addition, qualitative analysis by independent expert physicians assessed model-generated explanations, identifying hallucinatory events, with lower inter-rater agreement in misclassified cases. These results suggest that language models in Brazilian Portuguese may approximate human-level reasoning in medical questions.

The Grade of Breathiness Index (GBI): AFuzzy Logic Model for Vocal Assessment.

Purpose To translate, culturally adapt, and evaluate the reliability, validity, and responsiveness of the Brazilian Portuguese version of the Knee Injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score for Children (KOOS-Child-Br) in children and adolescents with knee injuries. Materials and methods This is a clinical measurement study. Cross-cultural adaptation was assessed via cognitive debriefing. Test–retest reliability was evaluated using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC2,1). Internal consistency was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha. Construct validity was assessed by correlations between KOOS-Child-Br subscales and the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory (PedsQL™), and between the pain subscale and the Numerical Pain Rating Scale (NPRS). Responsiveness was evaluated through correlations with the Global Perceived Effect Scale (GPES) and effect size. Results 135 participants were evaluated. KOOS-Child-Br subscales showed excellent test-retest reliability (ICC2,1 = 0.84–0.91) and adequate internal consistency (α = 0.77–0.93). KOOS-Child-Br showed moderate to good correlation with the PedsQL™ (r = 0.65–0.82), moderate correlation between the pain subscale and the NPRS (r = −0.66), moderate to high effect size (0.60–0.84) and an adequate correlation with the GPES (rho = 0.35–0.56). Conclusions KOOS-Child-Br is reliable, valid and responsive in children and adolescents with knee injuries.

The early and accurate assessment of decoding is critical for preventing persistent reading difficulties, particularly in large-scale educational systems facing chronic disparities. This study aimed to validate a digital decoding assessment task named Protocolo de Avaliação da Decodificação (PRADE) - Protocol for Decoding Assessment specifically designed for Brazilian Portuguese, a language characterized by high orthographic transparency. The primary objective was to establish the psychometric equivalence of this software-based tool compared to a paper-and-pencil gold-standard test (TDE), while the secondary objective examined its sensitivity to the developmental progression of reading automaticity. A stratified sample of 250 elementary school children (grades 1–5) from both public and private schools was assessed. Results indicated excellent internal consistency (α > .90) and strong convergent validity, with moderate-to-strong correlations (r = .40 to .75) between PRADE and the gold-standard test across all grades. The instrument also demonstrated robust criterion-related validity, effectively differentiating proficiency tiers and teacher-rated academic performance groups. Furthermore, the findings reveal that linguistic variables, such as word length, significantly modulate decoding efficiency (accuracy and speed), even in a transparent orthography. These results reflect the qualitative transition from effortful phonological assembly to autonomous orthographic recognition, aligning with established developmental frameworks. This study validates PRADE as a robust and scalable tool for large-scale monitoring and contributes to a more typologically diverse science of reading by incorporating data from an under-researched, transparent orthographic system.

Self-transcendent emotions (STEs), including positive and threatening awe, compassion, admiration, elevation, gratitude, and love, expand one’s focus beyond the self and foster a sense of connection with something larger (e.g., people, nature, a higher power). Questions remain about the content structure that differentiates or unifies these emotions. We conducted four studies in Brazil, analyzing 1,683 narratives from the general population to clarify the nature and range of STEs in this underrepresented context. Study 1 developed and validated items measuring these emotions in Brazilian Portuguese, particularly critical for awe, as it lacks a direct translation. In Study 2, a bottom-up, qualitative template analysis from participants’ narratives yielded an initial coding template with 24 themes. Study 3 refined this template through qualitative coding, producing a final set of 34 unique themes. The theme of ‘connection with living forms’ emerged consistently across all STE narratives. Self-reported valence classifications indicated that several STEs’ experiences were ambivalent. In Study 4, a thematic hierarchical analysis revealed a robust link between positive and threatening awe, suggesting that these two variants share thematic elements compared to other STEs. Our qualitative narrative approach highlights STE’s thematical diversity and ambivalent valence, indicating that STEs do not form a homogeneous emotion category. Instead, our findings suggest that STEs are loosely connected to emotional reactions that share transcendental properties and are linked to cultural and social identities, but are likely driven by distinct affective processes.

ABSTRACT This study aimed to describe the development and the content validation of a digital booklet, written in Brazilian Portuguese, designed for healthcare professionals on managing relationships with fibromyalgia patients. This study was structured in four distinct stages. In Stage 1, a narrative review was conducted with the following guiding question: ‘What are the main findings of empirical qualitative research on the healthcare professional-fibromyalgia patient relationship?’. In Stage 2, the knowledge synthesis generated in Stage 1 was used by the research team to guide the development of the first version of the booklet. In Stage 3, the first version of the booklet was submitted to a qualitative analysis by a multidisciplinary committee composed of experts. The research team prepared the second version of the booklet by incorporating the experts’ requested adjustments, and, in Stage 4, this version was submitted to a quantitative analysis by target audience members. Stage 1 led to the selection of 19 references, whose main results were organized in five thematic categories. In Stage 2, based on the research team’s consensus, 10 recommendations were established and presented in the first version of the booklet. In Stage 3, the experts suggested adding specific information and correcting details in the wording of the booklet. These adjustments were implemented, resulting in the second version of the booklet, which was used in Stage 4. All recommendations presented in the booklet, as well as the booklet as a whole, were considered content-valid based on the quantitative analysis provided in Stage 4 by the target audience members. Therefore, the second version of the booklet has practical implications, as it may support Brazilian Portuguese-speaking healthcare professionals in enhancing their relational competencies in order to strengthen their interactions with fibromyalgia patients.

This study explores the use of a supervised Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline for automatic misinformation classification in Brazilian Portuguese. The method combines semantic retrieval based on dense embeddings with traditional machine learning classification using TF–IDF and Support Vector Machine. Experiments were conducted on the largest publicly available Brazilian Portuguese fake news dataset, previously consolidated by the authors from multiple sources, and performance was compared with results from the literature using classical methods such as SVM. The results indicate that while supervised RAG provides competitive performance, its gains over traditional approaches may be limited when the dataset is balanced and linguistically homogeneous. A detailed error analysis is presented, and the potential of supervised RAG in more challenging and low-resource scenarios is discussed.

Abstract In this paper, we study how meaning of a polysemous lexical item is distinguished in a terminological research study to account for terms from the field of the environment in Brazilian Portuguese. This research is related to two multilingual terminological resources, the DiCoEnviro — Dictionnaire fondamental de l’environnement — and A framed version of DiCoEnviro , both under the coordination of the Observatoire de Linguistique Sens-Texte (OLST), Université de Montréal , Canada. The focus is on the verb poluir (to pollute), a polysemous lexical item, extracted from a corpus, especially compiled for the research, made up of scientific articles on the topic of pollution. The research draws on the lexicon-driven approach (LDA) encompassing two frameworks, Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology (ECL) and Frame Semantics (FS). Based on eight methodological steps, the terminological research adopts a specific perspective on the linguistic properties of terms and on the expression of specialized knowledge in semantic frames. The results show two meanings for poluir , poluir 1a and poluir 1b , each meaning presenting a different argument structure, with a different number of arguments and semantic roles, and attributed to different frames, Contamination and Cause_Contamination respectively.

ABSTRACT Consumer eating experiences are strongly tied to sensory pleasure and emotional responses from multisensory stimuli. This study aimed to advance knowledge in sensory consumer science through a cross-modal approach. In an experiment with Brazilian consumers (N = 148), two types of sounds – one associated with bitterness (low frequency) and the other with sweetness (high frequency) – were played while participants tasted dark chocolate (54.5% cocoa). Emotions were measured using a lexicon adapted to Brazilian Portuguese, and acceptance was rated on a 9-point hedonic scale. Perceptions of bitterness and sweetness were assessed using a bitter-sweet scale. Results showed that the sweet sound significantly (p < .05) elicited positive emotions like tenderness, nostalgia, and hope, while the bitter sound triggered negative emotions such as longing, anxiety, tension, and fear. The perception of sweetness also increased significantly (p < .05) with the sweet sound. Chocolate acceptance remained consistent across all scenarios (p > .05). These findings confirm that sound can influence both taste perception and emotional responses, enriching the overall consumption experience. Additionally, the use of emotion measurement proved to be a valuable tool in elucidating the associations between stimuli and emotions, offering deeper insights into the multisensory nature of food experiences. This study enhances our understanding of how sound shapes sensory and emotional perceptions, providing practical insights for designing more engaging and memorable eating experiences in the foodservice business.

To develop and test an instrument in Brazilian Portuguese to evaluate KAP regarding GDM. We developed an instrument with 22 items (10 items for practice, 4 for knowledge and 8 for attitude), which was tested in a population of pregnant women (24 - 28 weeks) with GDM. We performed an Exploratory Factor Analysis to evaluate the items included in the instrument, the covariance among the domains evaluated by the instrument, and the robustness of the instrument. One hundred seventy-five participants were included in this study (mean gestational age: 25.4±7.1 weeks). The majority of them did not present adequate KAP regarding diabetes. The average knowledge score was 0.84±1.02 points; the attitude score was 32.46±2.94; and the practice score was 4.65±1.65. The model with the best robustness to evaluate KAP was composed of 3 items for knowledge, 6 for attitude, and 5 for practice. The levels of KAP regarding diabetes among Brazilian pregnant women are low. The moderate association between knowledge and practice underscores the need for targeted educational interventions within prenatal care. Implementing a specific Brazilian Portuguese instrument to evaluate KAP among this population can bring evidence regarding the dimension of the problem in the country.

Purpose The global spread of recovery colleges (RCs) demands culturally adapted fidelity measures to support international implementation and research. This study aims to translate, culturally adapt and pilot test the RECOLLECT Fidelity Measure and Checklists for Brazil, addressing the critical need for assessing RC fidelity in diverse contexts. Design/methodology/approach A rigorous five-step methodology was used for translation and cultural adaptation. This included initial and back-translation, consultation with original developers, multidisciplinary review and pilot testing of student and peer educator checklists within a Brazilian artistic-cultural recovery project. Findings This study produced a culturally adapted Brazilian Portuguese version of the instruments. Pilot data from the Checklists (descriptive, non-psychometric tools) showed that the adaptation mainly involved linguistic modifications for Brazilian relevance. The pilot demonstrated overall high fidelity to RC principles. However, the Co-production and Community Focus domains exhibited less alignment, suggesting areas for future Brazilian RC development. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first adaptation and pilot testing of RC fidelity instruments for a Latin American context, providing culturally appropriate measures to inform future recovery research and practice in the region. This study provides the necessary foundational step of cultural adaptation, which is a prerequisite for future psychometric validation of the Fidelity Measure. These findings highlight the feasibility and importance of adapting fidelity measures to local contexts, especially in resource-scarce regions such as Brazil and Latin America.

Measurement properties of the Premature Infant Pain Profile-Revised applied at the bedside by physical therapists in the NICU.

Iconic words are characterized by a sense of resemblance between their form and their meaning. The most common examples are onomatopoeias such as “cock-a-doodle-doo” or “woof-woof,” but recent research shows that speakers of various languages perceive a relationship between sound and meaning in various words of their language. This is the case for English words such as crunchy, zigzag or wiggle, whose sonority is perceived as mapping onto their meaning (Winter et al., 2023). Recently, psycholinguistic research has investigated whether iconicity influence language processing. Sidhu, Vigliocco and Pexman (2020) ran a lexical decision task with words varying in their iconicity level. Their results show that the more iconic a word is, the quicker participants react to it, thus suggesting that iconicity may have a facilitatory effect in word recognition. We plan to replicate their study with a sample of Brazilian Portuguese speakers and Brazilian Portuguese words to test their main claim that reaction times in a classic lexical decision task could be influenced by the stimuli’s level of iconicity in a neurotypical population of adults. Our analysis plan closely follows the original study. A successful replication should show that participants react faster to words with higher iconicity ratings.

Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common congenital anomaly and a major cause of neonatal morbidity and mortality worldwide. A prenatal diagnosis of CHD is a psychologically distressing event that requires sensitive and effective counseling. However, no validated tool exists in Brazilian Portuguese to assess the quality of counseling provided to families following such diagnosis. To conduct the cross-cultural adaptation and content validation of "Kovacevic Questionnaire" for evaluating parental counseling after prenatal CHD diagnosis into Brazilian Portuguese. This cross-sectional study followed the standardized guidelines for cultural adaptation proposed by Beaton et al. The process included translation, synthesis, back-translation, expert review, pre-testing, and psychometric evaluation. Two Expert Committees assessed semantic, idiomatic, cultural, and conceptual equivalence. Content Validity Index (CVI), Prevalence- and Bias-Adjusted Kappa (PABAK), and Content Validity Coefficient (CVC) were calculated. The adapted instrument was pre-tested with ten pregnant women carrying fetuses diagnosed with CHD. The adaptation process resulted in a culturally relevant and linguistically accurate Brazilian version. Expert agreement was high, with most items achieving CVI and PABAK values close to 1.0 and CVC values ≥ 0.80. Minor linguistic refinements were made for clarity and cultural sensitivity. Pre-test participants rated all items as clear and relevant, with CVI and PABAK equal to 1.00. The Brazilian Portuguese version of "Kovacevic Questionnaire" demonstrated high validity and acceptability. It provides clinicians and researchers with a reliable tool to assess and enhance counseling quality for families facing prenatal CHD diagnoses, particularly in diverse and resource-constrained settings such as the Amazon region.

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