Background A health system that provides equitable health care is a principal goal in many countries. Measuring horizontal inequity (HI) in health care utilization is important to develop appropriate and equitable public policies, especially policies related to non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Design A cross-sectional survey of 1,211 randomly selected households in slum and non-slum areas was ...

background: complete and fast diagnosis, registry and treatment programs are the main effective strategies for controlling infectious diseases. in addition, an organized and extended infectious disease surveillance system is crucial in designing and monitoring communicable diseases control programs. the quality of the surveillance system can be evaluated by several indices such as timeliness, c...

BACKGROUND The global prevalence of overweight and obesity had risen in recent decades, and obesity is taken into consideration as a public health concern and a major risk factor of common chronic disease. The objective of the present study was to estimate the prevalence of overweight and obesity and to identify its underlying factors among children 2-6 yr of age in Fars Province, southern Iran...

The Centre for Health Program Evaluation (previously known as the NHMRC National Centre for Health Program Evaluation) was formed to meet the need for evaluation of health programs and the development of appropriate evaluation methodologies for the Australian context. It seeks to contribute to government policy deliberations and to the national debate on health insurance policy, hospital waitin...

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) treatment has been commonly used to treat Chronic Hepatitis B (CHB) in Asian countries based on TCM syndrome diagnosis, also called "ZHENG". The syndrome is identified through the four-diagnostic methods, with certain degree of subjectivity and ambiguity from individual doctors. Normally those CHB patients also receive series of parameters from modern clinical...

STUDY OBJECTIVES Numerous indexes derived from polysomnography are available to characterize sleep-disordered breathing, with no consensus over which measures best predict clinical outcomes. This study addresses the relative merits of using alternative polysomnography indexes by characterizing the consistency and strength of the association of each index with blood pressure and hypertension. ...

BACKGROUND The complete blood count (CBC) is the most common examination used to monitor overall health in clinical practice. Whether there is a relationship between CBC indexes and alanine transaminase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST) has been unclear. MATERIAL AND METHODS In this study, 572 normal-weight and 346 overweight Chinese subjects were recruited. The relationship between CB...

Some concern about recently published nonpatient data, plus the fact that some records in the published sample of 600 nonpatients (Exner, 2001) were collected more than 20 years ago, prompted the initiation of a project to develop a new nonpatient sample. In this article, findings are presented for the first 175 participants tested in the new project. It is noted that the data from the new proj...

This paper proposes a reduced rank regression framework for constructing coincident and leading indexes. Based on a formal definition that requires that the first differences of the leading index are the best linear predictor of the first differences of the coincident index, it is shown that the notion of polynomial serial correlation common features can be used to build these composite variabl...