A Review of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Immunizations for Elderly Adults.

Vaccine preventable diseases are responsible for a substantial degree of morbidity in the United States as over 18 million annual cases of vaccine preventable disease occur in the U.S. annually.

The Economic Impact of Herpes Zoster Vaccine Disparities in Elderly United States Blacks.

There are persistent disparities with regard to receipt of herpes zoster vaccine among elderly blacks, but no data is available regarding the public health or economic impact of these disparities. A decision tree was constructed with multiple Markov nodes in order to estimate the preventable cases of herpes zoster occurring among elderly blacks due to disparities in receipt of herpes zoster vaccine and to quantify the economic costs associated with these disparities. The model was constructed to examine the number of herpes zoster cases occurring among elderly blacks from the age of 60 to 84 over a 20 year period and also calculated costs due to herpes zoster complications and lost productivity.

Assessment and predictors of antiretroviral adherence in older HIV-infected patients.

Advances in the diagnosis and treatment of HIV disease have resulted in increased survival for HIV-infected patients. Strict adherence to antiretroviral therapy is required to obtain these benefits, however. This holds true for older patients who often are diagnosed later in their disease course and who have shorter survival periods than younger patients.

Organic redox-initiated polymerization process for the fabrication of hydrogels for colon-specific drug delivery.

Organic-redox initiated polymerization technique based on the co-initiators system comprising benzoyl peroxide and N-phenyldiethanolamine was used at ambient temperature to fabricate pH-responsive hydrogels. The effects of changes in the concentration of the co-initiators system, the ratio in which the co-initiators combined, the type of the polymerization solvent, the pH of the hydrating medium, the concentration of the cross-linking agent based on azo-bond and the pH-sensitive cross-linking agent on the properties of the hydrogels were investigated. Increasing the concentration of the co-initiators system, decreasing the concentration of the two types of cross-linking agents, and replacing DMSO by ethanol as the polymerization solvent resulted in hydrogels with increased equilibrium swelling ratio and increased molecular weight between cross-links at pH 7.