This guideline, together with its sister guideline on the classification of urticaria (Zuberbier T, Asero R, Bindslev-Jensen C, Canonica GW, Church MK, Giménez-Arnau AM et al. EAACI/GA²LEN/EDF/WAO Guideline: definition, classification and diagnosis of urticaria. Allergy 2009;64: 1417-1426), is the...

To assess the socio-economic impact of infectious intestinal disease (IID) on the health care sector, cases and their families, cases of IID ascertained from a population cohort component and those presenting to general practices were sent a socio-economic questionnaire 3 weeks after the acute...

This thesis contrasts vaccine innovation efforts in the cases of poliomyelitis and HIV/AIDS. It addresses the question of why some fields of human endeavour can be seen to yield positive change more quickly than others. The thesis develops a perspective that views innovation as a cumulative...

Objectives: to systematically review cost benefit studies of telemedicine. Design: systematic review of English language, peer reviewed journal articles. Data sources: searches of Medline, Embase, ISI citation indexes, and database of Telemedicine Information Exchange. Studies selected: 55 of...

Summary Partial adherence in osteoporosis increases the risk for fragility fracture and has considerable impact on cost-effectiveness. This review highlights a number of avenues for further research, such as improved definition of thresholds of compliance and persistence, as well as gap length,...

This thesis discusses issues arising in the analysis of repeated measurement studies with missing data. The first part of the thesis is motivated by a study where continuous and bounded longitudinal data form the outcome of interest. The aim of this study is to investigate the change over time...

Background: Multiple imputation (MI) provides an effective approach to handle missing covariate data within prognostic modelling studies, as it can properly account for the missing data uncertainty. The multiply imputed datasets are each analysed using standard prognostic modelling techniques to...

This work seeks to develop a high quality prognostic model for the CARE-HF data; see (Richardson et al. 2007). The CARE-HF trial was a major study into the effects of cardiac resynchronization. Cardiac resynchronization has been shown to reduce mortality in patients suffering heart failure due to...

Background: Additional insights into patient preferences can be gained by supplementing discrete choice experiments with best-worst choice tasks. However, there are no empirical studies illustrating the relative advantages of the various methods of analysis within a random utility...

Organizational culture has been shown by organizational psychology to influence important aspects of staff behaviour. In particular, mismatches between staff perceptions of real and ideal organizational cultures have been shown to be associated with a range of negative outcomes for staff, such...