In this article, the authors present findings on differences in Medicare costs between elderly beneficiaries who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid and other Medicare beneficiaries. Data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS) were used in the analysis. After controlling for health and functional-status differences, the higher Medicare costs of dually eligible persons, re...

The Tonal and Speech Materials for Auditory Perceptual Assessment, Disc 1.0 audio compact disc developed in 1992 includes several sets of degraded speech materials, two of which, time compression and reverberation, are described in this paper. The digital techniques used to compress the NU No. 6 materials (female speaker) on an 80386-based computer are described, along with a series of experime...

In controlled clinical trials, topiramate (Topamax) has demonstrated efficacy in refractory patients with complex partial seizures and secondarily generalized tonic-clonic seizures. Approximately 45 percent of 534 patients had a > or = 50 percent reduction in seizure frequency. Limited open label trials have shown that topiramate has broad spectrum activity and may be effective in patients with...

www.aafp.org/afp AMERICAN FAMILY PHYSICIAN 315 tially estimated an incidence of 75 per 100,000 persons per year, but subsequent prospective studies give a range of 12.6 to 18 per 100,000 persons annually. Controversy still exists about the correct incidence because of differing criteria used to define ARDS. The prevalence of ARDS is reported to be between 15 and 18 percent of all ventilated pat...

We describe a system which automatically transcribes broadcast news in less than 10 times real-time. We detail the system architecture of this system, which was used by IBM in the 1999 HUB4 10xRT evaluation, and show that the performance of this system is over 20 percent more accurate at the same speed than the system we used in the 1998 evaluation. Furthermore, we have closed the gap in word r...

With the advent of more extensive testing for coronary artery disease, much new information about the details of this condition has surfaced. It has been known for many years that myocardial infarction can be silent and recent epidemiologic studies indicate that 25 to 35 percent of infarcts can be silent. This silence, of course, in no way implies a better prognosis. Indeed, in the Framingham s...