STUDY OBJECTIVE Our objective is to evaluate the incremental cost-effectiveness of use of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and automated external defibrillators (AEDs) by lay responders (CPR+AED) versus CPR only for cardiac arrest during a multicenter randomized trial. METHODS This was a prospective trial from July 2000 to September 2003 that randomly assigned 993 community units (eg, offi...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the cost-effectiveness of external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) or newer radiation therapy (RT) modalities such as intensity modulated radiation (IMRT) or brachytherapy among older women with favorable-risk breast cancer. METHODS Using a Markov model, we estimated the cost-effectiveness of no RT, EBRT, and IMRT over 10 years. We estimated the incremental cost...

In some cases the optimum is the minimum of the objective function (mathematical optimum), but in other cases the optimum is given by a technical constraint (technical optimum). The present paper shows the both types in two problems. The first problem is to find the optimum dimensions of a ring-stiffened circular cylindrical shell subject to external pressure, which minimize the structural cost...

Prior literature on the diversification discount and the relative efficiency of internal versus external capital markets provides decidedly mixed results. We argue that transactions cost economics are useful in understanding this puzzle. According to transactions cost economics, diversified firms should outperform single-segment firms in industries with higher external transaction costs (e.g., ...

Public access defibrillation The time delay to defibrillation can be reduced by five minutes if performed by a first responder to the cardiac arrest rather than by the usual paramedic service. In a review of five controlled trials in which emergency medical technicians were taught to defibrillate, odds ratios for improved survival ranged from 3.3 to 6.9. Emergency medical technicians were taugh...

BACKGROUND Cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) that use patient-specific data from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) are popular, yet such CEAs are criticized because they neglect to incorporate evidence external to the trial. A popular method for quantifying uncertainty in a RCT-based CEA is the bootstrap. The objective of the present study was to further expand the bootstrap method of RCT-ba...