Hospital costs and factors associated with days alive and at home after surgery (DAH ).

Objective: To assess the relationships of patient and surgical factors and hospital costs with the number of days alive and at home during the 30 days following surgery (DAH ).

Design: Retrospective cohort study; analysis of Medibank Private health insurance hospital claims data, Australia, 1 January 2016 - 31 December 2017.

Setting, Participants: Admissions of adults (18 years or older) to hospitals for elective or emergency inpatient surgery with anaesthesia covered by private health insurance, Australia, 1 January 2016 - 31 December 2017.

Beyond mean modelling: Bias due to misspecification of dispersion in Poisson-inverse Gaussian regression.

In clinical trials one traditionally models the effect of treatment on the mean response. The underlying assumption is that treatment affects the response distribution through a mean location shift on a suitable scale, with other aspects of the distribution (shape/dispersion/variance) remaining the same. This work is motivated by a trial in Parkinson's disease patients in which one of the endpoints is the number of falls during a 10-week period.

White blood cell count predicts reduction in coronary heart disease mortality with pravastatin.

Background: Elevated serum inflammatory marker levels are associated with a greater long-term risk of cardiovascular events. Because 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme-A reductase inhibitors (statins) may have an antiinflammatory action, it has been suggested that patients with elevated inflammatory marker levels may have a greater reduction in cardiovascular risk with statin treatment.

Methods And Results: We evaluated the association between the white blood cell count (WBC) and coronary heart disease mortality during a mean follow-up of 6.