BACKGROUND Quality of life (QoL) is routinely assessed and evaluated in medical research. However, in Japan, there is a lack of solid cutoff criteria for evaluating QoL improvement in chronic noncancer pain management. The present study was conducted to identify the minimal clinically important change (MCIC) of the Japanese version of EuroQol-5D 3L(EQ-5D) utility score and numeric rating scale ...

BACKGROUND As populations age, chronic geriatric conditions linked to progressive organ failure jeopardize health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Thus, this research assessed the validity and applicability of the EQ-5D (a common HRQoL instrument) across four major chronic geriatric conditions: hearing issues, joint damage, urinary incontinence, or dizziness with falls. METHODS The study samp...

BACKGROUND Grass allergen immunotherapy (AIT) reduces symptom severity in seasonal allergic rhinoconjunctivitis (ARC) but its impact on general health-related utility has not been characterised for the purposes of economic evaluation. The aim of this study was to model the preferred measure of utility, EQ-5D index, from symptom severity and estimate incremental quality adjusted life years (QALY...

BACKGROUND Utility scores are used to estimate Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs), applied in determining the cost-effectiveness of health care interventions. In studies where no preference based measures are collected, indirect methods have been developed to estimate utilities from clinical instruments. The aim of this study was to evaluate a published method of estimating the EuroQol-5D (EQ-...

OBJECTIVE Using inflammatory arthritis patients as an example, we investigate EuroQol-5D (EQ-5D) profiles resulting in states worse than death (WTD), and the heath status of patients occupying these states. METHODS Baseline data from two UK trials were used that reflected the range of arthritis states/severity found in routine practice. EQ-5D profiles resulting in negative valuations (i.e., s...

Quorum sensing is a form of system stimulus and response that is correlated to population density. Many species of bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate various types of behavior including bioluminescence, biofilm formation, virulence, and antibiotic resistance, based on the local density of the bacterial population [10, 7, 9, 24, 40, 36, 42, 27]. In an analogous fashion, some social insect...