Experiencing deteriorating health has implications for your quality of life. The theory of adaptation suggests that with time spend living in a health state individuals can adapt, resulting in observed quality of life levels to revert or stagnate despite persistently decreased health. Adaptation has implications for the use of subjective quality of life indicators when quantifying the impact of health changes or the benefits from new medical technologies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo evaluate a commercially available mobile device for the highly specialized task of detection of intracranial arterial aneurysm in telemedicine. Six radiologists with three different levels of experience retrospectively interpreted 60 computed tomography (CT) angiographies for the presence of intracranial arterial aneurysm, among them 30 cases with confirmed positive findings. Each radiologist reviewed the angiography datasets twice: once on a dedicated medical-grade workstation and on a commercially available mobile consumer-grade tablet with an interval of 3 months.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDecisions on interventions or policy alternatives affecting health can be informed by economic evaluations, like cost-benefit or cost-utility analyses. In this context, there is a need for valid estimates of the monetary equivalent value of health (gains), which are often expressed in € per quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). Obtaining such estimates remains methodologically challenging, with a recent addition to the health economists' toolbox, which is based on well-being data: The well-being valuation approach.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFacing rapidly ageing populations, many Western countries aim to stimulate informal care provision as a way to meet the growing long-term care (LTC) demand. While various studies report the impact of providing informal care on the health of caregivers, it is less clear whether and to what extent this impact differs across countries. Using propensity score matching we match caregivers to similar non-caregiving individuals using four waves of the Dutch Study on Transitions in Employment, Ability and Motivation and the UK Household Longitudinal Study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Process optimization in computed tomography (CT) and telemedicine.
Purpose: To compare image quality and objective diagnostic accuracy of medical-grade and consumer-grade digital displays/computer terminals for detection of intracranial aneurysms.
Material And Methods: Four radiologists with different levels of experience retrospectively read a total of 60 patients including 30 cases of proven therapy-naïve intracranial aneurysm detectable on a medical-grade grayscale calibrated display.