BACKGROUND Regionalization of care has been proposed for complex operations based on hospital/surgeon volume-mortality relationships. Controversy exists about whether more common procedures should be performed at high-volume centers. Using mortality alone to assess routine operations is hampered by relatively low perioperative mortality. We used a large national database to analyze the risk of ...

BACKGROUND In 2005, maximum safe surgical resection, followed by radiotherapy with concomitant temozolomide (TMZ), followed by adjuvant TMZ became the standard of care for glioblastoma (GBM). Furthermore, a modest, but meaningful, population-based survival improvement for GBM patients occurred in the US between 1999 (when TMZ was first introduced) and 2008. We hypothesized that TMZ usage explai...

BACKGROUND In observational studies concerning drug use and misuse, persons misusing drugs may be less likely to respond to surveys. However, little is known about differences in drug use and drug misuse risk factors between survey respondents and nonrespondents. METHODS Using electronic health record (EHR) data, we compared respondents and non-respondents in a telephone survey of middle-aged...

BACKGROUND Identification of patients at risk of death from cancer surgery should aid in preoperative preparation. The purpose of this study is to assess and adjust the age-adjusted Charlson comorbidity index (ACCI) to identify cancer patients with increased risk of perioperative mortality. METHODS We identified 156,151 patients undergoing surgery for one of the ten common cancers between 200...

BACKGROUND Understanding comorbidity prevalence and the effects of comorbidities in older veterans with lower extremity amputations may aid in assessing patient outcomes, resource use, and facility-level quality of care. OBJECTIVES To determine the degree to which adding outpatient to inpatient administrative data sources yields higher comorbidity prevalence estimates and improved explanatory...

In this study, we infer health care indices of individuals using their pharmacy medical and prescription claims. Specifically, we focus on the widely used Charlson Index. We use data mining techniques to formulate the problem of classifying Charlson Index (CI) and build predictive models to predict individual health index score. First, we present comparative analyses of several classification a...

Aims: The purpose of this study was to analyze the prevalence of depression, anxiety, adjustment disorders, and somatoform disorders in patients diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in Germany. Methods: This study included 7,580 patients between the ages of 40 and 90 diagnosed with AMD between January 2011 and December 2014 in 1,072 primary care practices (index date). The last...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the most important factors affecting the prognosis of the patients with squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) of the larynx. METHODS Based on the clinical and follow-up data, 205 patients with SCC of the larynx receiving total laryngectomy, partial laryngectomy, or CO2 laser surgery in GuangDong General Hospital were retrospectively analyzed. A survival analysis was performe...

BACKGROUND Intensive chemotherapy (IC) used to treat acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is associated with toxicity, particularly in older adults. Emerging data suggest that baseline quality of life (QOL) and physical function may predict outcomes in oncology, although data in AML are limited. We investigated the association between baseline QOL and physical function with short-term treatment outcome...

BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH OBJECTIVE Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) has been viewed as the most important clinical outcome of heart failure (HF) management. However, information about the predictors of HRQOL in Taiwanese people with HF is limited, especially for the effects of sleep disturbances on HF. PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to identify predictors of HRQOL in Taiwanese peo...