BACKGROUND Information on non-fatal health outcomes of disease and injury has been largely neglected in health planning because of the conceptual and definitional complexity of measuring morbidity and disability in populations. One of our major objectives was to quantify disability for inclusion in health policy debates. We analysed these health outcomes in terms of disability-free life expecta...

OBJECTIVES We examined the contribution of religious involvement to age-related declines in health by examining the association of worship attendance with measures of different stages in the disability continuum. METHOD Participants included 5,863 Black and White older adults from the Chicago Health and Aging Project. Worship attendance was coded in 3 levels: very frequent (several times a we...

BACKGROUND Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a rare chronically debilitating disease. There are few reports on the burden of disease of MS and prevalence in China. The authors intended to estimate disease burden and prevalence of MS in Shandong Province using available epidemiologic data. METHODS Prevalence was calculated using DISMOD II software based on incidence extrapolated from hospitalization ...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this analysis is to report the incremental costs and benefits of different doses of spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) in patients with chronic low back pain (LBP). METHODS We randomized 400 patients with chronic LBP to receive a dose of 0, 6, 12, or 18 sessions of SMT. Participants were scheduled for 18 visits for 6 weeks and received SMT or light massage control from...

Protozoa, such as Cryptosporidium parvum and Giardia lamblia, pose a human health risk when present in drinking water. To minimize health risks, the Nova Scotia Treatment Standards for surface water and groundwater under the direct influence of surface water require a 3-log reduction for Giardia cysts and Cryptosporidium oocysts. This study determined the protozoan risk of municipal surface sou...

OBJECTIVES Little is known about the prognosis of community-acquired bacteraemia (CAB) in workforce adults. We assessed return to workforce, risk for sick leave, disability pension and mortality within 1 year after CAB in workforce adults compared with blood culture-negative controls and population controls. DESIGN Population-based cohort study. SETTING North Denmark, 1996-2011. PARTICIPA...

Since 2000 several papers have examined the efficiency of healthcare delivery systems worldwide. These papers have extended the literature using drastically different input and output combinations from one another, with little theoretical or empirical support backing these specifications. Issues arise that many of these inputs and outputs are available for a subset of OECD countries each year. ...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the burden of type 2 diabetes mellitus and its percentage attributable to overweight and obesity in Brazil. METHODS The burden of diabetes mellitus was described in terms of disability-adjusted life years, which is the sum of two components: years of life lost and years lived with disability. To calculate the fraction of diabetes mellitus attributable to overweight, obesit...

M for evaluating health quality are central to medical decision analyses. The most important such method is the quality-adjusted life year (QALY), in which a patient’s length of life is given weight proportional to his/her quality of health. QALYs have become ubiquitous in medical cost-effectiveness as a measure of preference for health outcomes. However, numerous studies have demonstrated that...