Association of Formulary Exclusions and Restrictions for Opioid Alternatives With Opioid Prescribing Among Medicare Beneficiaries.

Importance: Although there are many pharmacologic alternatives to opioids, it is unclear whether the structure of Medicare Part D formularies discourages use of the alternatives.

Objectives: To quantify the coverage of opioid alternatives and prevalence of prior authorization, step therapy, quantity limits, and tier placement for these drugs, and test whether these formulary exclusions and restrictions are associated with increased opioid prescribing to older adults at the county level.

Design, Setting, And Participants: County fixed-effect models were estimated using a panel of counties across the 50 US states and the District of Columbia over calendar years 2015 and 2016.

Approaches to Predicting Outcomes in Patients with Acute Kidney Injury.

Despite recognition that Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) leads to substantial increases in morbidity, mortality, and length of stay, accurate prognostication of these clinical events remains difficult. It remains unclear which approaches to variable selection and model building are most robust. We used data from a randomized trial of AKI alerting to develop time-updated prognostic models using stepwise regression compared to more advanced variable selection techniques.

Birth weight and risk of paediatric Hodgkin lymphoma: Findings from a population-based record linkage study in California.

Objective: To evaluate the relationship between birth weight (along with a variety of pre and perinatal characteristics) and the risk of paediatric Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) diagnosed at age <20 years.

Method: We linked California statewide birth records from 1978-2009 and cancer diagnosis data from 1988-2011 to conduct a population-based case-control study with 1216 cases and 4485 controls (matched on birth month and year, sex, and race/ethnicity). Conditional logistic regression was used to estimate odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) of paediatric HL overall and by age of diagnosis, controlling for other perinatal factors.

Failure mode analysis of silicon-based intracortical microelectrode arrays in non-human primates.

Objective: Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) using chronically implanted intracortical microelectrode arrays (MEAs) have the potential to restore lost function to people with disabilities if they work reliably for years. Current sensors fail to provide reliably useful signals over extended periods of time for reasons that are not clear. This study reports a comprehensive retrospective analysis from a large set of implants of a single type of intracortical MEA in a single species, with a common set of measures in order to evaluate failure modes.