Using Joint Longitudinal and Time-to-Event Models to Improve the Parameterization of Chronic Disease Microsimulation Models: an Application to Cardiovascular Disease.

Background: Chronic disease microsimulation models often simulate disease incidence as a function of risk factors that evolve over time (e.g., blood pressure increasing with age) in order to facilitate decision analyses of different disease screening and prevention strategies.

Cost-Effectiveness of Screening Asymptomatic Carotid Stenosis by Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Risk.

Importance: Extracranial internal carotid artery stenosis (50-99% arterial narrowing) is an important risk factor for ischemic stroke. Yet, the benefits and harms of targeted screening for asymptomatic carotid artery stenosis (ACAS) have not been assessed in population-based studies.

Objective: To estimate the cost-effectiveness of one-time, targeted ACAS screening stratified by atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk using the American Heart Association's Pooled Cohort Equations.

Screening Strategies to Reduce COVID-19 Mortality in Nursing Homes.

Importance: Nursing home residents continue to bear a disproportionate share of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality, accounting for 9% of all US COVID-19 deaths in 2023, despite comprising only 0.4% of the population.

Objective: To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of screening strategies in reducing COVID-19 mortality in nursing homes.

Integrating decision modeling and machine learning to inform treatment stratification.

There is increasing interest in moving away from "one size fits all (OSFA)" approaches toward stratifying treatment decisions. Understanding how expected effectiveness and cost-effectiveness varies with patient covariates is a key aspect of stratified decision making. Recently proposed machine learning (ML) methods can learn heterogeneity in outcomes without pre-specifying subgroups or functional forms, enabling the construction of decision rules ('policies') that map individual covariates into a treatment decision.

Very-low-density lipoprotein triglyceride and free fatty acid plasma kinetics in women with high or low brown adipose tissue volume and overweight/obesity.

Although a high amount of brown adipose tissue (BAT) is associated with low plasma triglyceride concentration, the mechanism responsible for this relationship in people is not clear. Here, we evaluate the interrelationships among BAT, very-low-density lipoprotein triglyceride (VLDL-TG), and free fatty acid (FFA) plasma kinetics during thermoneutrality in women with overweight/obesity who had a low (<20 mL) or high (≥20 mL) volume of cold-activated BAT (assessed by using positron emission tomography in conjunction with 2-deoxy-2-[F]-fluoro-glucose). We find that plasma TG and FFA concentrations are lower and VLDL-TG and FFA plasma clearance rates are faster in women with high BAT than low BAT volume, whereas VLDL-TG and FFA appearance rates in plasma are not different between the two groups.