Impact of COVID-19 on elderly population well-being: evidence from European countries.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of COVID-19 on multidimensional well-being in the European population aged 50 and over by measuring changes in individual well-being before and after the pandemic outbreak. To capture the multidimensional nature of well-being, we consider different dimensions: economic well-being, health status, social connections and work status. We introduce new indices of change in individual well-being that measure non-directional, downward and upward movements.

Effect of the number of removed lymph nodes on prostate cancer recurrence and survival: evidence from an observational study.

Background: The aim of this article is to analyze the effect on biochemical recurrence and on overall survival of removing an extensive number of pelvic lymph nodes during prostate cancer surgery. The lack of evidence from randomized clinical trials to address this specific question has hampered the ability to determine the true effect of the number of nodes removed.

Results: Our analysis is based on a large observational study, and this can lead unadjusted estimates to be very sensitive to confounding bias due to the different prognosis of individuals.

Longevity and concentration in survival times: the log-scale-location family of failure time models.

Evidence suggests that the increasing life expectancy levels at birth witnessed over the past centuries are associated with a decreasing concentration of the survival times. The purpose of this work is to study the relationships that exist between longevity and concentration measures for some regression models for the evolution of survival. In particular, we study a family of survival models that can be used to capture the observed trends in longevity and concentration over time.

The Gini concentration test for survival data.

We apply the well known Gini index to the measurement of concentration in survival times within groups of patients, and as a way to compare the distribution of survival times across groups of patients in clinical studies. In particular, we propose an estimator of a restricted version of the index from right censored data. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the resulting Gini statistic, and construct an estimator for its asymptotic variance.