BACKGROUND Based on the well-described excess of schizophrenia births in winter and spring, we hypothesised that individuals with schizophrenia (a) would be more likely to be born during periods of decreased perinatal sunshine, and (b) those born during periods of less sunshine would have an earlier age of first registration. METHODS We undertook an ecological analysis of long-term trends in ...

Prior studies have shown that financial relationships between editorialists and the biopharmaceutical industry are associated with increased likelihood of favorable descriptions of evidence, even when that evidence is unfavorable. How financial conflicts among editorialists should be managed—whether disclosure or recusal is necessary—has been a longstanding debate in medicine. In 1990 under edi...

Daily sunshine duration is commonly reported at weather stations. Beyond the basic duration report, more information is available from scorched cards of Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorders, such as the estimation of direct-beam solar irradiance. Sunshine cards therefore potentially provide information on sky state, as inferred from solar-radiation data. Some sites have been operational since the...

Kenneth Kipnis hypothesizes that a company paying a physician for services related to one of its products merits a share of responsibility for harmful outcomes (Kipnis 2011). His arguments fail because they are based on a widely held but false assumption and onmisleading analogies. The false assumption is that industry payments to physicians results in harm to patients. Misleading analogies app...

BACKGROUND While many new medications may offer advantages over existing drugs, some newer drugs are reformulations of existing products that provide little innovation or incremental benefit while driving up drug costs. Despite the lack of benefit of these medications, prescribers may be motivated by payments made by the pharmaceutical industry. The objective of the study was to determine the a...

OBJECTIVE To describe the relationship between industry and physicians and to analyze the physician characteristics associated with the probability of receiving benefits from industry in Aragon (Spain). METHODS We carried out an observational, cross-sectional study in which Aragonese physicians (north-east region in Spain) from public and private settings completed an anonymous questionnaire ...

We are in a period of unprecedented scrutiny of the relationships between the pharmaceutical industry and doctors [1–4]. Legislators are now considering how they might become involved in the regulation of these practices. This is a telling comment on the perceived failure of the medical profession to regulate itself and of self-regulation by industry. But reliable and comprehensive data on the ...

By lowering the transaction costs associated with barter, a payments system greatly facilitates the exchange of goods and services. Although vastly improved over the years, the process of transferring funds remains costly, and the evolution of the payments system has been at least partially determined by efforts to trim these costs further. Increasing the productivity of the payments system imp...