Alzheimer Data on the effectiveness of these drugs from information beyond the short-term clinical trials (e.g. long-term clinical trials and non-trial data) are now emerging. In most cases, the results indicate that, at least for some patients, continued treatment with cholinesterase inhibitors...

Schizophrenia is a chronic disease that typically manifests during adolescence and early adulthood. Treatment of this disease consumes a significant proportion of the healthcare budget (billions of dollars in the US). Primary management options for schizophrenia include both pharmacologic and...

Objective: To evaluate a pneumonia disease management programme in a naturalistic setting. Design and Setting: A 300 000 member managed-care organisation introduced an antibacterial treatment guideline designed to change antibacterial prescribing by physicians. A relational database was created...

HIV disease is a serious global health problem and a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. It has recently been estimated that more than 30 million adults and 1.1 million children are infected with HIV; it is expected that 40 million people will have acquired the virus by the year...

The over-the-counter (OTC) conversion of loratadine was approved in the US in December 2002 for the treatment of allergic rhinitis, representing the first second-generation antihistamine (SGA) to be made available as an OTC product. This review examines the current evidence regarding the impact...

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is an autosomal recessive genetic disorder; it is most common in the Caucasian populations, with a prevalence of about 1 per 2500 births. The disorder is associated with progressive lung disease and pancreatic enzyme deficiency, leading to considerable morbidity and...

A hand-held interactive electronic lung function device and tele-health monitoring system (AirWatch(TM) Airway Monitoring System, ENACT Health Management Systems, Inc., Mountain View, California, USA) has been developed that measures, records and reports airway status via a remote computer to...

The US disease management (DM) industry continues to endorse the use of the methodologically flawed pre-post design to evaluate financial outcomes, which regularly reports returns on investment of up to 8___1. This is in sharp contrast to the peer-reviewed literature and large Medicare...

Background: One particularly difficult challenge in evaluating disease management (DM) programs is defining the scope of economic outcomes to include in the evaluation. Measuring `all-cause utilization' or `total costs' assumes that a DM intervention impacts the entire spectrum of services...