A biological model is developed here to determine the fittest attitude to risk. With a fixed environment, the type maximizing expected offspring is selected. This yields the expected utility theorem when translated into a criterion for evaluating gambles over commodities. With a random environment, however, the type selected is strictly less averse to idiosyncratic risk than to risk which is co...

introduction: acute myeloid leukemia (aml) is a clonal disease characterized by heterogeneous involvement of hematopoietic bone marrow cell populations. in aml patients, a variety of clinical and biologic parameters, including surface markers, have been examinedfor potential value in predicting treatment response and survival. by checking the myeloid, lymphoid and nonspecific markers on the bla...

PURPOSE To assess long-term functional outcome and survival among patients with meningioma World Health Organization (WHO) grade I. METHODS Retrospective analysis of 205 patients after resection of WHO grade I intracranial meningioma from 1985 through 2003. Expected age- and sex-specific survival was calculated by applying Dutch life-table statistics to each patient for the individual duratio...

Survival analytic models were used to determine the effects of Axis II pathology and dysfunctional cognitions on depressive relapse in a sample of 50 depressed inpatients followed 33 to 84 months (M = 49.9) postdischarge. In analyses based on follow-up interview measures, expected remission duration among patients without personality disorders was approximately 7.4 times longer than among patie...

Background—Few data exist on long-term outcomes of elderly patients after aortic valve replacement. We evaluated latest follow-up information for patients 70 years of age after aortic valve replacement. Methods and Results—Late overall survival of 2890 consecutive patients 70 years of age who underwent aortic valve replacement between January 1993 and December 2007 was reviewed retrospectively,...

BACKGROUND Few data exist on long-term outcomes of elderly patients after aortic valve replacement. We evaluated latest follow-up information for patients ≥70 years of age after aortic valve replacement. METHODS AND RESULTS Late overall survival of 2890 consecutive patients ≥70 years of age who underwent aortic valve replacement between January 1993 and December 2007 was reviewed retrospectiv...

OBJECTIVES Age-related degenerative heart-valve disease is a health issue in the present era. Octogenarians are frequently affected by concomitant diseases and, with the present lack of resources, the risk/benefit of valvular replacement therapy poses serious medical, economical and political challenge. We analysed the long-term survival of 346 octogenarians who underwent 352 operations between...

Background: Arsenic trioxide (ATO) has been reported as an effective anti-cancer and a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved drug for treatment of some cancers. The aim of this study is to determine the underlying apoptosis molecular and cellular mechanisms of ATO in the presence or absence of ionizing radiation (IR) in vitro in the glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) cell line, U87MG. Metho...

Conventionally, the time between diagnosis and date of last follow up or death is used to plot survival curves for patients with cancer. This ignores the patient's expected life span had the patient been healthy at the time of diagnosis. In human terms the impact of a projected prognosis of 10 year survival on a woman diagnosed as having breast cancer, for example, may be different depending on...

Individualized treatment rules recommend treatments based on individual patient characteristics in order to maximize clinical benefit. When the clinical outcome of interest is survival time, estimation is often complicated by censoring. We develop nonparametric methods for estimating an optimal individualized treatment rule in the presence of censored data. To adjust for censoring, we propose a...