BACKGROUND: Most of the indicators commonly used to assess social deprivation are poorly suited to study health inequalities in older people. The EPICES (Evaluation of Deprivation and Inequalities in Health Examination Centres) score is a new composite index commonly used to measure individual deprivation. OBJECTIVE: To assess the relationships between health indicators and the EPICES score in older people.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealthcare authorities make difficult decisions about how to spend limited budgets for interventions that guarantee the best cost-efficacy ratio. We propose a novel approach for treatment decision-making, OMES-in French: Objectif thérapeutique Modèle Effet Seuil (in English: Therapeutic Objective-Threshold-Effect Model; TOTEM). This approach takes into consideration results from clinical trials, adjusted for the patients' characteristics in treatment decision-making.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Dietary fluoride supplements were first introduced to provide systemic fluoride in areas where water fluoridation is not available. Since 1990, the use of fluoride supplements in caries prevention has been re-evaluated in several countries.
Objectives: To evaluate the efficacy of fluoride supplements for preventing dental caries in children.
Although personalized medicine has been a subject of research and debate in recent years, it has been underused in medical practice, except in some cancers. We believe that the main reason for the gap between the potential of personalized medicine and its use in daily medical practice can be explained by the lack of an appropriate tool to facilitate the use of biomarker values in a doctor's decision-making process. We propose that the effect model could form the basis of such a tool.
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