Submitted manuscripts should be arranged according to the rules stated in "Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals" in JAMA 1997; 277: 927-34. The full document is available at www.icmje.org

When submitting a paper, the author should always make a full statement to the editor about all submissions and previous reports that might be regarded as redundant or duplicate publication of the same or very similar work.

Conflict of interest and funding: Authors are responsible for recognising and disclosing financial and other conflicts of interest that might bias their work. They should acknowledge in the manuscript all financial support for the work and other financial or personal connections to the work.

Statistic validity: If statistical data are provided the authors are requested to submit an official statement issued by a certified statistician (with a proper affiliation) regarding the validity of methods used.

Ethics and consent: When reporting experiments on human subjects, indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 1983. Do not use patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material. Papers including animal experiments or clinical trials must be accompanied by an approval by the local ethics committee. Please give date of issue and registration number.

Identifying information should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that the patient be shown the manuscript to be published.

Please use these simple guidelines when preparing your electronic manuscript:

1. Be consistent. The same elements should be keyed in exactly the same way throughout the manuscript.
2. Do not break words at the end of lines. Use a hyphen only to hyphenate compound words.
3. Enter only one space after the full-stop at the end of a sentence.
4. When emphasizing words, please use the italic feature of your word processor software.
5. Do not justify your text; use a ragged right-hand margin.
6. Use a double hyphen (--) to indicate a dash in text.
7. Do not use the lowercase letter l for the number 1 (one) or the uppercase O for 0 (zero).
8. The space bar should only be used as a word separator. Use TAB when indenting paragraphs or separating columns in tables.

Abstract and Key words: The abstract to original articles should be structured with the following subheadings; Objective, Material and Methods, Results and Conclusions. It should not exceed 250 words. Below the abstract authors should provide 3-10 key words.

1.         Vega KJ, Pina I, Krevsky B. Heart transplantation is associated with an increased risk for pancreatobiliary disease. Ann Intern Med 1996;124:980-3.

2.         More than six authors: Parkin DM, Clayton D, Black RJ, Masuyer E, Friedl HP, Ivanov E, et al. Childhood leukemia in Europe after Chernobyl: 5 year follow-up. Br J Cancer 1996;73:1006-12.

3.         Phillips SJ, Whisnant JP. Hypertension and stroke. In: Laragh JH, Brenner BM, editors. Hypertension: pathophysiology, diagnosis, and management. 2nd ed. New York: Raven Press;1995, p.465-78.

For abbreviations of journal titles, please consult the List of Journals Indexed in Index Medicus available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/serials/lji.html.

Tables: Type each table double-spaced on a separate sheet. Do not supply tables as photographs. Number the tables consecutively (Roman numerals) as they appear in the text and supply a brief title for each. Place explanatory matter in footnotes. Identify statistical measures of variations such as SD and SEM. Use asterisks for significant values. Indicate in the manuscript the approximate position for each table.

Photographic illustrations should be rendered with a resolution of at least 300 DPI; please use CMYK color conversion if possible. The images should measure at least one column width (80 mm) across, to fit into the journal layout.