BACKGROUND This is the first analysis to estimate the costs of commercially insured patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) in the USA. Prior analyses of PD have not examined costs in patients aged under 65 years, a majority of whom are in the workforce. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to estimate direct and indirect costs associated with PD in patients under the age of 65 years who are newly diag...

INDIRECT ophthalmoscopy is one of the most important methods of fundus examination, especially in cases of detachment of the retina. The advantages of this method over direct ophthalmoscopy include a larger field of view, a more brilliant image, and a greater depth of focus. It is especially valuable for the examination of the highly myopic eye. The stereoscopic view obtained with the binocular...

Given a sample from a fully specified parametric model, let Zn be a given finite-dimensional statistic for example, an initial estimator or a set of sample moments. We propose to (re-)estimate the parameters of the model by maximizing the likelihood of Zn. We call this the maximum indirect likelihood (MIL) estimator. We also propose a computationally tractable Bayesian version of the estimator ...

The goal of this paper is to simulate a tax shift from labour to consumption and perform a distributional analysis of the reform. Microsimulation programs are often uniquely focussed on the personal income tax system and on social security contributions and benefits. However, against a political background where income taxes are under increased pressure and alternative, less distortive forms of...

Using the indirect hemagglutination (IH), indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) and enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) tests for the diagnosis of Chagas disease, 4000 serum samples were examined. This study was conducted with different purposes: clinical interest, research support and parasitological monitoring of those patients with Chagas disease who were treated with heart transplantation...

BACKGROUND To analyze costs associated with dementia based on a cross-sectional study in the Brazilian health system. METHODS Direct and indirect costs were estimated by conducting comprehensive interviews on the use of resources in a sample of 156 patients with dementia treated at an outpatient memory clinic of a tertiary hospital. A regression model was used to determine the main determinan...

INTRODUCTION Indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) is the gold standard method for the detection of antinuclear antibodies (ANA) which are essential markers for the diagnosis of systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases. For the discrimination of positive and negative samples, we propose here an original approach named Immunofluorescence for Computed Antinuclear antibody Rational Evaluation (ICARE) ba...

This paper presents a novel pattern called temporal indirect association. An indirect association pattern refers to a pair of items that rarely occur together but highly depend on the presence of a mediator itemset. The existing model of indirect association does not consider the lifespan of items. Consequently, some discovered patterns may be invalid while some useful patterns may not be cover...