Editorial: Pursuing Efficiency: A Dead End for HTA?

Editorial: Pursuing efficiency: a dead end for HTA?

A Dead End for MicroRNAs

Dead end (Dnd1) is an RNA-binding protein that mediates germ-cell viability and suppresses the formation of germ-cell tumors. Kedde et al. (2007) now provide evidence that Dnd1 mediates these effects by counteracting microRNA-mediated silencing of mRNAs.

Pursuing efficiency in surgical practice.

To examine fluctuations in numbers of patients on surgical wards the dates of admission from January of each of the 5556 patients admitted from 1 January 1985 to 31 December 1987 were examined during computerised audit of a single surgical firm. The numbers of patients under the care of the firm fluctuated widely, often exceeding the 38 beds nominally available. Duration of stay varied from two...

Use of Surrogate end points in HTA

The different actors involved in health system decision-making and regulation have to deal with the question which are valid parameters to assess the health value of health technologies.So called surrogate endpoints represent in the best case preliminary steps in the casual chain leading to the relevant outcome (e. g. mortality, morbidity) and are not usually directly perceptible by patients. S...

Dead-End Driven Learning

The paper evaluates the e ectiveness of learning for speeding up the solution of constraint satisfaction problems. It extends previous work (Dechter 1990) by introducing a new and powerful variant of learning and by presenting an extensive empirical study on much larger and more di cult problem instances. Our results show that learning can speed up backjumping when using either a xed or dynamic...