Challenges in e-Health: The effect of digitalisation of frequency voiding charts on compliance in paediatric patients. Randomised controlled trial comparing digital and versus paper frequency voiding charts.

Objective: Frequency voiding charts are commonly used to gain better insight into the voiding and drinking behaviours of patients with voiding symptoms. Non-compliance when filling out a chart is known to be high. The use of a digital application might increase adherence, but little research has been conducted on this topic.

Dysfunctional Voiding: Exploring Disease Transition From Childhood to Adulthood.

Objective: To improve our transitional care, we explored how childhood dysfunctional voiding (DV) develops into adulthood. DV is a common condition in both children and adults. However, the long-term course of childhood DV into adulthood is unknown and treatment over the ages differs.

Study protocol for a parallel-group randomized controlled multi-center trial evaluating the additional effect of continuous ultrasound bladder monitoring in urotherapy for children with functional daytime urinary incontinence (SENS-U trial).

Background: Lower urinary tract dysfunction or functional urinary incontinence is a common condition with a prevalence up to 21% between 6 and 8 year-old children. It is associated with an impaired quality of life, lower self-esteem, and social stigmatization. Urotherapy is the first treatment of choice for functional daytime urinary incontinence (DUI) in children.

Younger age and female gender are determinants of underestimated cardiovascular risk in rheumatoid arthritis patients: a prospective cohort study.

Background: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients have an increased cardiovascular (CV) risk. Here, we aimed to investigate whether gender and age are contributing to the misclassification of CV risk in RA patients.

Methods: Prospectively collected data on cardiovascular risk factors and incident events from the Nijmegen inception cohort were analyzed, with up to 10 years follow-up.

The Challenge of Conditional Reimbursement: Stopping Reimbursement Can Be More Difficult Than Not Starting in the First Place!

Background: Conditional reimbursement of new health technologies is increasingly considered as a useful policy instrument. It allows gathering more robust evidence regarding effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of new technologies without delaying market access. Nevertheless, the literature suggests that ending reimbursement and provision of a technology when it proves not to be effective or cost-effective in practice may be difficult.

Health or Happiness? A Note on Trading Off Health and Happiness in Rationing Decisions.

Background: Economic evaluations typically value the effects of an intervention in terms of quality-adjusted life-years, which combine length and health-related quality of life. It has been suggested that economic evaluations should incorporate broader outcomes than health-related quality of life. Broader well-being, for instance measured as happiness, could be a better measure of the overall welfare effects in patients because of treatment.

Are some QALYs more equal than others?

Including societal preferences in allocation decisions is an important challenge for the health care sector. Here, we present results of a phased discrete choice experiment investigating the impact of various attributes on respondents' preferences for distribution of health and health care. In addition to the renowned equity principles severity of illness (operationalized as initial health) and fair innings (operationalized as age), some characteristics of beneficiaries (culpability and having dependents) and the disease (rarity) were included in the choice experiment.

Recombinant modified vaccinia virus Ankara expressing glycoprotein E2 of Chikungunya virus protects AG129 mice against lethal challenge.

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) infection is characterized by rash, acute high fever, chills, headache, nausea, photophobia, vomiting, and severe polyarthralgia. There is evidence that arthralgia can persist for years and result in long-term discomfort. Neurologic disease with fatal outcome has been documented, although at low incidences.

A discrete choice experiment to obtain a tariff for valuing informal care situations measured with the CarerQol instrument.

Background / Objective: Economic evaluations adopting a societal perspective need to include informal care whenever relevant. However, in practice, informal care is often neglected, because there are few validated instruments to measure and value informal care for inclusion in economic evaluations. The CarerQol, which is such an instrument, measures the impact of informal care on 7 important burden dimensions (CarerQol-7D) and values this in terms of general quality of life (CarerQol-VAS).

Mechanism and Reaction Coordinate of Directional Charge Separation in Bacterial Reaction Centers.

Using first-principles molecular dynamics, we predict the reaction coordinate and mechanism of the first charge-separation step in the reaction center of photosynthetic bacteria in a model including the special pair (P) and closest relevant residues. In the ground state, a dynamical localization of the highest occupied orbital is found to be a defining characteristic of P. This feature is linked to the tuning of the orbital energy levels by the coupling with two collective low-frequency vibrational modes.

Balancing equity and efficiency in the Dutch basic benefits package using the principle of proportional shortfall.

Economic evaluations are increasingly used to inform decisions regarding the allocation of scarce health care resources. To systematically incorporate societal preferences into these evaluations, quality-adjusted life year gains could be weighted according to some equity principle, the most suitable of which is a matter of frequent debate. While many countries still struggle with equity concerns for priority setting in health care, the Netherlands has reached a broad consensus to use the concept of proportional shortfall.

Cognitive and behavioral interventions for the management of chronic neuropathic pain in adults--a systematic review.

Background: Chronic neuropathic pain is often associated with conditions such as depression and anxiety and strongly affects daily functioning and overall quality of life. It is argued, therefore, that psychosocial interventions should be added to traditional biomedical interventions. This systematic review evaluates the effectiveness of cognitive and behavioral interventions for the management of chronic neuropathic pain.