BACKGROUND Diagnosis costs for cardiovascular disease waste a large amount of healthcare resources. The aim of the study is to evaluate the clinical and economic outcomes of alternative diagnostic strategies in low risk chest pain patients. METHODS We evaluated direct and indirect downstream costs of 6 strategies: coronary angiography (CA) after positive troponin I or T (cTn-I or cTnT) (strat...

Clinical studies have demonstrated that high dose adjuvant interferon therapy improves disease-free and overall survival among high risk (stage IIb and III) melanoma patients. Sentinel lymph node mapping (SLM) has been shown to accurately detect micrometastasis and may be used to identify higher risk stage II patients, who might benefit most from adjuvant interferon therapy. We modelled the cos...

mitochondrial respiration is a complex process which its biochemistry is often poorly understood by undergraduate students when explained in toxicology lectures. the use of experiments to reinforce their knowledge is important, but not always possible because of low teaching budgets. therefore, a low cost model, made using water, oil, styrofoam and modeling clay, is presented here to simulate t...

BACKGROUND Delivery of the pneumococcal vaccine (PCV) to street-involved, HIV patients in British Columbia is low due to poor compliance. Since the use of PCV is expected to reduce morbidity and mortality, it may be more cost-effective to provide the vaccine directly to clinics. METHODS Three strategies were compared for a cohort of 5000 patients: 1) administering PCV at the clinics; 2) givin...

BACKGROUND Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) with tenofovir and emtricitabine effectively prevents new HIV infections. The optimal scenario for implementing PrEP where most infections are averted at the lowest cost is unknown. We determined the impact of different PrEP strategies on averting new infections, prevalence, drug resistance and cost-effectiveness in Macha, a rural setting in Zambia. ...

We evaluated whether age- and gender-based colorectal cancer screening is cost-effective.Recent studies in the United States identified age and gender as 2 important variables predicting advanced proximal neoplasia, and that women aged <60 to 70 years were more suited for sigmoidoscopy screening due to their low risk of proximal neoplasia. Yet, quantitative assessment of the incremental benefit...

exceeded losses of nonstructural components from structural ones in most demolished buildings in previous earthquakes and its limitation on functionality of critical facilities and building serviceability after earthquakes should be got the point of view for accounting loss of building as a merit for building performance. this paper attempts to demonstrate the significant role of distribution p...

adsorption capacity of cr (vi) onto cousinia eryngioides boiss, activated carbon was investigated in a batch system by considering the effects of various parameters like contact time, initial concentration, ph, temperature, agitation speed, absorbent dose and particle size. cr (vi) removal is ph dependent and found to be maximum at ph 2.0. the amounts of cr (vi) adsorbed increased with increase...

[10, 22] presented various ways for introducing quasi-random numbers or derandomization in evolution strategies, with in some cases some spectacular claims on the fact that the proposed technique was always and for all criteria better than standard mutations. We here focus on the quasi-random trick and see to which extent this technique is efficient, by an in-depth analysis including convergenc...