Background:Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is currently the fourth leading cause of death worldwide. It has serious health effects and causes substantial costs for society. Abstract: Objectives:Objectives: The aim of the present paper was to develop a state-of-the-art...

Background: Various software packages are commonly used for the implementation and calculation of decision-analytic models for health economic evaluations. However, comparison of these programs with regard to ease of implementing a model is lacking. Objectives: (i) to compare the assets and...

Obesity among children and adolescents is a growing public health burden. According to a national reference among German children and adolescents aged 3-17 years, 15% are overweight (including obese) and 6.3% are obese. This study aims to assess the economic burden associated with overweight and...

Objective To evaluate healthcare and outcomes of disease management programmes (DMPs) for patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) in primary care, and to assess selection of enrolment for these programmes.Methods A cross-sectional survey of 2330 statutorily insured patients with a history of...

A genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment was conducted in a discovery sample of 101,069 individuals and a replication sample of 25,490. Three independent single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are genome-wide significant (rs9320913, rs11584700, rs4851266), and all three...

Multi-state transition models are widely applied tools to analyze individual event histories in the medical or social sciences. In this paper we propose the use of (discrete-time) competing-risks duration models to analyze multi-transition data. Unlike conventional Markov transition models,...

The Risk Adjustment Reform Act of 2001 mandates that a health-status-based risk adjustment mechanism has to be implemented in Germany's Statutory Health Insurance system by January 1, 2007. German parliament decided this as with the existing demographic risk adjustment model, that means there is...