Optimal nutrition across the continuum of care plays a key role in the short- and long-term clinical and economic outcomes of patients. Worldwide, an estimated one-quarter to one-half of patients admitted to hospitals each year are malnourished. Malnutrition can increase healthcare costs by delaying patient recovery and rehabilitation and increasing the risk of medical complications. Nutrition ...

Cycling is popular among children, but results in thousands of injuries annually. In recent years, many states and localities have enacted bicycle helmet laws. We examine direct and indirect effects of these laws on injuries. Using hospital-level panel data and triple difference models, we find helmet laws are associated with reductions in bicycle-related head injuries among children. However, ...

Intraarterial thrombolytic therapy with urokinase (UK) offers documented advantages to alternatives for treating both subacute and the initial presentation of acute peripheral arterial occlusion (PAO), including reduced morbidity and mortality. Treatment with intraarterial UK does not increase overall health care costs; hospital length of stay is either similar to that with other therapies (acu...

BACKGROUND Low-back pain (LBP) affects about 40% of people at some point in their lives. In the presence of "red flags", further tests must be done to rule out underlying problems; however, biomedical imaging is currently overused. LBP involves large in-hospital and out-of-hospital economic costs, and it is also the most common musculoskeletal disorder seen in emergency departments (EDs). PAT...

Some assert that it is impossible to test preference restrictions against revealed preference. The “goodness” preference restriction simply assumes that one value of a nonmarket good is preferred over another other with any fixed commodity consumption. This paper uses a preference-theoretic methodology to show how goodness can be falsified by revealed preference for compensation-based welfare a...

INTRODUCTION The empirical evidence for the effectiveness of excise tax increases as a tool for tobacco control and for generating government revenue is overwhelming. Although initially this evidence was generated primarily in high-income countries, the past two decades has seen much evidence originating in low-income and middle-income countries. The findings are broadly similar. The answer to ...

Department of Neurology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research/Center for Health Policy, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA Department of Medicine, Center for Health and the Social Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinoi...