A matter of life and death: population mortality and football results.

Objectives: To determine whether football results are associated with mortality from circulatory disease.

Design: Retrospective study, comparing mortality on days of football matches between 18 August 1994 and 28 December 1999 with the results of the football matches.

Setting: Newcastle and North Tyneside, Sunderland, Tees, and Leeds Health Authority areas of England.

Lanterns in the jungle: is the NHS driven by the wrong kind of efficiency?

The performance of the National Health Service is assessed in part by an Efficiency Index (EI) which is applied to the service as a whole as well as to individual health authorities. The EI relates increases in the amount of patient care activity to increases in total expenditure. The index can give a misleading impression of performance, creates perverse incentives and is at odds with the overall strategy of the health service which is to place greater emphasis on the promotion of health and to provide more care in primary and community-based settings.

Clinically diagnosed presenile dementia of the Alzheimer type in the Northern Health Region: ascertainment, prevalence, incidence and survival.

Potential cases of presenile dementia of the Alzheimer type (PDAT) in the Northern Health Region (estimated population aged 45-64, 655,800) were ascertained for the years 1979-86 from in-patient ICD-9 codes and other sources. An algorithm was applied to the casenote information to distinguish between Alzheimer-type and other forms of dementia. A search of the NHS central register was made to establish date and place of death.