Background: Vitamin A Supplementation (VAS) is a cost-effective intervention to decrease mortality associated with measles and diarrheal diseases among children aged 6-59 months in low-income countries. Recently, experts have suggested that other interventions like large-scale food fortification and increasing the coverage of measles vaccination might provide greater impact than VAS. In this study, we conducted a cost-effectiveness analysis of a VAS scale-up in three sub-Saharan African countries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Household contacts of people with pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) have greater risk of developing TB. Recent guidelines conditionally recommended TB preventive treatment (TPT) for household contacts of any age living in TB high-incidence countries, expanding earlier guidance to provide TPT to household contacts under five. The all-age population of household contacts has not been estimated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: US health care spending has continued to increase and now accounts for 18% of the US economy, although little is known about how spending on each health condition varies by payer, and how these amounts have changed over time.
Objective: To estimate US spending on health care according to 3 types of payers (public insurance [including Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs], private insurance, or out-of-pocket payments) and by health condition, age group, sex, and type of care for 1996 through 2016.
Design And Setting: Government budgets, insurance claims, facility records, household surveys, and official US records from 1996 through 2016 were collected to estimate spending for 154 health conditions.
Objective: Health care spending on diabetes in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the past several decades.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Health care spending in the United States increased substantially from 1995 to 2015 and comprised 17.8% of the economy in 2015. Understanding the relationship between known factors and spending increases over time could inform policy efforts to contain future spending growth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: One of the major challenges in estimating health care spending spent on each cause of illness is allocating spending for a health care event to a single cause of illness in the presence of comorbidities. Comorbidities, the secondary diagnoses, are common across many causes of illness and often correlate with worse health outcomes and more expensive health care. In this study, we propose a method for measuring the average spending for each cause of illness with and without comorbidities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: US health care spending has continued to increase, and now accounts for more than 17% of the US economy. Despite the size and growth of this spending, little is known about how spending on each condition varies by age and across time.
Objective: To systematically and comprehensively estimate US spending on personal health care and public health, according to condition, age and sex group, and type of care.
Importance: Health care spending on children in the United States continues to rise, yet little is known about how this spending varies by condition, age and sex group, and type of care, nor how these patterns have changed over time.
Objective: To provide health care spending estimates for children and adolescents 19 years and younger in the United States from 1996 through 2013, disaggregated by condition, age and sex group, and type of care.
Evidence Review: Health care spending estimates were extracted from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Disease Expenditure 2013 project database.
Background: In 2013 the United States spent $2.9 trillion on health care, more than in any previous year. Much of the debate around slowing health care spending growth focuses on the complicated pricing system for services.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAn improved understanding of the factors that regulate the migration of human embryonic stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hESC-CMs) would provide new insights into human heart development and suggest novel strategies to improve their electromechanical integration after intracardiac transplantation. Since nothing has been reported as to the factors controlling hESC-CM migration, we hypothesized that hESC-CMs would migrate in response to the extracellular matrix and soluble signaling molecules previously implicated in heart morphogenesis. To test this, we screened candidate factors by transwell assay for effects on hESC-CM motility, followed by validation via live-cell imaging and/or gap-closure assays.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF