1,720,956 research outputs found
Evaluation of cholesterol levels and predictors of goal achievement in a hypercholesterolemic population.
No full textCOSTI E BISOGNI SANITARI DEGLI ANZIANI NON AUTOSUFFICIENTI PRESSO LE STRUTTURE RESIDENZIALI: STRATEGIE E INTERVENTI PER UNA POPOLAZIONE CHE INVECCHIA. FARMACOECONOMIA E PERCORSI TERAPEUTICI
No full textResource consumption and costs of treating pain in patients affected by cancer in a district of northeast Italy.
No full textWHO declared that pain is a relevant problem in public health and that opioids are the gold standard therapy for the treatment of moderate to severe pain. The present retrospective, epidemiological, observational study is aimed to evaluate resource consumption therapy in patients treated with opioids and died with a diagnosis of cancer in Treviso, a district in northeast Italy. For the monetisation of resource consumed, the Italian National Health Service perspective was adopted. For each patient, resource monetized were drugs (opioids, NSAIDs and adjuvants), hospitalizations with cancer diagnosis, diagnostic examinations and laboratory tests. All databases were linked in order to obtain patient profile of resource consumption. A total of 935 patients were included in the study. The incident opioid prescribed were for 60% morphine, 37% fentanyl, and 2.5% buprenorphine. The average length of treatment with opioids was 105+/-73 days. Of the patients included in the study, 79% received an anti-inflammatory drug (traditional NSAIDs and/or COX2 inhibitors), while 21% of patients treated with opioids never had an anti-inflammatory reimbursed prescription during the observation period. The average length of anti-inflammatory treatment was 133+/-83 days. For the vast majority of prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs, the received daily dose (RDD) was widely greater then the defined daily dose (DDD) before and during treatment with opioids, while for opioids the RDD was in line with the revised DDD for fentanyl, and less than the DDD for morphine and buprenorphine. The total daily cost per patient before the first prescription of opioids was euro 11.36 while after the first prescription of opioids, it increased to euro 21.12. This study confirms the under utilization of opioids in Italy both in terms of dosages and length of therapy
Evaluation of the prescription and utilization patterns of statins in an Italian local health unit during the period 1994-2003
No full textOBJECTIVES: The prescription pattern of statins in the Local Health Unit (LHU) of Treviso (northern Italy) over a 10-year period was evaluated, with the aim of evaluating the persistence with and adherence to therapy.
METHODS: Data on 21,393 subjects who received at least one prescription for statins during the period between January 1, 1994 and December 31, 2003 were retrieved from the LHU database in order to track the pharmacological history of individual patients. The data included age, sex, drug formulation, strength, number of drug packages prescribed, and prescription date. The adopted indicators for drug utilization included the Defined Daily Dose (DDD), the Received Daily Dose (RDD), and a surrogated Prescribed Daily Dose (sPDD), extrapolated from available prescription data. An Adherence to Therapy Index (ATI) was calculated from the ratio between the amount of drug actually prescribed and the amount of sPDD. Based on the ATI, patients were grouped into non-adherent, poor-adherent, and good-adherent groups. The distribution of adherence level among patient-age classes and statin-prescribed patients in primary or secondary prevention was evaluated.
RESULTS: All drug-utilization indicators showed an increase in statin use over the study period in terms of both the number of prescribed patients and the sPDD. Persistence with and adherence to therapy remained low, with a 50% discontinuation rate in the first year, and persistent patients did not follow the therapy regularly. Patients in secondary prevention were the most adherent to their drug regimen, although only 41% of these had a good compliance.
CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest an increase in statin use which is, however, accompanied by poor patient persistence with and adherence to statin therapy
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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