The Disease Burden and Societal Costs of Hereditary Angioedema.

Background: According to the current treatment guidelines, the goals of treatment of patients with hereditary angioedema (HAE) are to achieve total control of the disease and to normalize patients' lives.

Objective: This study aims to establish the entire burden of HAE comprising disease control, treatment satisfaction, reductions in quality of life, and societal costs.

Methods: Adult patients with HAE under treatment at the Dutch national center of reference completed a cross-sectional survey in 2021.

Real-world evidence in health technology assessment of high-risk medical devices: Fit for purpose?

Health technology assessment (HTA) of medical devices (MDs) increasingly rely on real-world evidence (RWE). The aim of this study was to evaluate the type and the quality of the evidence used to assess the (cost-)effectiveness of high risk MDs (Class III) by HTA agencies in Europe (four European HTA agencies and EUnetHTA), with particular focus on RWE. Data were extracted from HTA reports on the type of evidence demonstrating (cost-)effectiveness, and the quality of observational studies of comparative effectiveness using the Good Research for Comparative Effectiveness principles.

Costs of Persons with Dementia Living in Nursing Homes in The Netherlands.

Background: Disease modifying treatments (DMTs) currently under development for Alzheimer's disease, have the potential to prevent or postpone institutionalization and more expensive care and might delay institutionalization of persons with dementia.

Objective: The current study estimates costs of living in a nursing home for persons with dementia in the Netherlands to help inform economic evaluations of future DMTs.

Methods: Data were collected during semi-structured interviews with healthcare professionals and from the financial administration of a healthcare organization with several nursing homes.

Acoustic Indoor Localization Augmentation by Self-Calibration and Machine Learning.

An acoustic transmitter can be located by having multiple static microphones. These microphones are synchronized and measure the time differences of arrival (TDoA). Usually, the positions of the microphones are assumed to be known in advance.

Addressing Health System Values in Health Technology Assessment: The Use of Evidence-Informed Deliberative Processes.

Health technology assessment (HTA) is increasingly used around the globe to inform resource allocation decisions. Furthermore, the importance of using explicit and transparent criteria for coverage decision making in line with health system values has been acknowledged. However, the values of a health system are often not explicitly taken into account in the HTA process.

Identifying and Bounding Ethnic Neighborhoods.

This study presents three novel approaches to the question of how best to identify ethnic neighborhoods (or more generally, neighborhoods defined any aspect of their population composition) and to define their boundaries. It takes advantage of unusual data on the residential locations of all residents of Newark, NJ, in 1880 to avoid having to accept arbitrary administrative units (like census tracts) as the building blocks of neighborhoods. For theoretical reasons the street segment is chosen as the basic unit of analysis.

Recognition of shapes by editing their shock graphs.

This paper presents a novel framework for the recognition of objects based on their silhouettes. The main idea is to measure the distance between two shapes as the minimum extent of deformation necessary for one shape to match the other. Since the space of deformations is very high-dimensional, three steps are taken to make the search practical: 1) define an equivalence class for shapes based on shock-graph topology, 2) define an equivalence class for deformation paths based on shock-graph transitions, and 3) avoid complexity-increasing deformation paths by moving toward shock-graph degeneracy.

Renal failure due to acute nephrocalcinosis following oral sodium phosphate bowel cleansing.

Nephrocalcinosis is a chronic tubulointerstitial nephropathy characterized by tubular calcium phosphate deposition and slowly progressive renal insufficiency. We report a novel association of acute nephrocalcinosis and acute renal failure (ARF) with colonoscopy preceded by a bowel-cleansing regimen consisting of oral sodium phosphate solution (OSPS). A cohort of 5 patients (mean age, 69.