Identification in censored regression analysis and hazard models of duration outcomes relies on the condition that censoring points are independent of latent outcomes, an assumption which may be questionable in many settings. This note proposes a test for this assumption based on a Kolmogorov-Smirnov-like test statistic comparing two different nonparametric estimators for the latent outcome cdf...

According to Dr Turcotte, this program “would have no effect on the absolute risk of dying” and therefore should not be implemented because it contradicts a principle of public health practice. There is no reference to support this statement, and its rigorous application would mean the end of most of Canada’s existing public health programs. As Dr Turcotte accepts that 30% of deaths from colore...

OBJECTIVE To understand general practitioners' (GPs) use of individual risk factors (blood pressure and cholesterol levels) versus absolute risk in cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk management decision-making. DESIGN Randomised experiment. Absolute risk, systolic blood pressure (SBP), cholesterol ratio (total cholesterol/high-density lipoprotein (TC/HDL)) and age were systematically varied in...

A standard result states that under decreasing absolute risk aversion the indifference premium of the insured is a decreasing function of wealth. This has been interpreted to mean that insurance is an inferior good, which has been considered as a puzzle in insurance theory, in particular since the result does not seem to explain observed behavior in insurance markets. We reformulate the standar...

We use household survey data to construct a direct measure of absolute risk aversion based on the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay to enter a lottery. We relate this measure to consumers’ endowment and attributes and to measures of background risk. We ...nd that risk aversion is a decreasing function of endowment thus rejecting CARA preferences but that the elasticity to consumption i...

BACKGROUND Treatment failure defined as progression of disease after initiation of ART or when the anti-HIV medications can't control the infection. One of the major concerns over the rapid scaling up of ART is the emergence and transmission of HIV drug resistant strains at the population level due to treatment failure. This could lead to the failure of basic ART programs. Thus this study aimed...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate fertility after salpingectomy or tubotomy for ectopic pregnancy. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study. SETTING Clinical University Center, Hvidovre Hospital, Copenhagen. POPULATION Two hundred and seventy-six women undergoing salpingectomy or tubotomy for their first ectopic pregnancy between January 1992 and January 1999 and who actively attempted to conceive were foll...

BACKGROUND Inequalities in progress towards achievement of Millennium Development Goal four (MDG-4) reflect unequal access to child health services. OBJECTIVE To examine the time trends, socio-economic and regional inequalities of under-five mortality rate (U5MR) in Nepal. METHODS We analyzed the data from complete birth histories of four Nepal Demographic and Health Surveys (NDHS) done in ...

One major goal in clinical applications of time-to-event data is the estimation of survival with censored data. The usual nonparametric estimator of the survival function is the time-honored Kaplan-Meier product-limit estimator. Though this estimator has been implemented in several R packages, the development of the condSURV R package has been motivated by recent contributions that allow the es...