How is Government Stability Affected by the State of the Economy? Payoff Structures, Government Type and Economic State

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 280-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Hellström ◽  
Daniel Walther

To what extent are incumbent governments affected by the state of the economy when it comes to premature dissolution? This article investigates this research question using a data set on parties and governments for 18 West European countries for the period 1945–2013. In addition to investigating the general effect of the state of the economy on government termination, we hypothesize that macroeconomic conditions affect cabinet termination in different ways depending on the type of government that is in power. Using Cox proportional hazards models to estimate how different government types are impacted by the same changes in the economy, our results indicate that economic changes do matter, but that they mainly affect coalition governments. Our results also indicate that there is a difference between minority and majority governments when it comes to the type of termination. Minority coalition governments resolve to early elections, not replacements, presumably because a minority government does not survive defection. Majority coalition governments, in contrast, show sensitivity towards both types of terminations.

2020 ◽  
pp. 073346482096720
Author(s):  
Woojung Lee ◽  
Shelly L. Gray ◽  
Douglas Barthold ◽  
Donovan T. Maust ◽  
Zachary A. Marcum

Informants’ reports can be useful in screening patients for future risk of dementia. We aimed to determine whether informant-reported sleep disturbance is associated with incident dementia, whether this association varies by baseline cognitive level and whether the severity of informant-reported sleep disturbance is associated with incident dementia among those with sleep disturbance. A longitudinal retrospective cohort study was conducted using the uniform data set collected by the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center. Older adults without dementia at baseline living with informants were included in analysis. Cox proportional hazards models showed that participants with an informant-reported sleep disturbance were more likely to develop dementia, although this association may be specific for older adults with normal cognition. In addition, older adults with more severe sleep disturbance had a higher risk of incident dementia than those with mild sleep disturbance. Informant-reported information on sleep quality may be useful for prompting cognitive screening.


2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (18_suppl) ◽  
pp. 4138-4138
Author(s):  
A. B. Siegel ◽  
R. McBride ◽  
D. Hershman ◽  
R. S. Brown ◽  
J. Emond ◽  
...  

4138 Background: Multiple case series have described the use of current therapies for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but recent estimates of treatment utilization in the general population and the impact of various treatments on survival are not known. Methods: We first identified 2898 adults diagnosed with HCC with known tumor size and stage in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End-Results Program (SEER), from 1998–2002. Treatment was categorized as transplant, resection, ablation, or none of these. We created a second data set of 1856 HCC patients who were potentially operable, as defined by SEER. We used these patients to construct Kaplan-Meier survival curves and adjusted Cox proportional hazards models. Results: The median age of the larger cohort at HCC diagnosis was 62 (range:18–96). Approximately 42% were white, 32% Asian, 16% Hispanic, and 10% African American. Overall, 10% received a transplant, 18% resection, 8% ablation, and 65% none of these. Only 5% of African Americans with HCC received a transplant, versus 12% of whites, 10% of Hispanics, and 8% of Asians. Asians were most likely to receive resection (24%) and ablation (9%), and least likely to have non-surgical treatment (60%). Using the restricted cohort, improved survival in the multivariate analysis was seen with later year of diagnosis, younger age, female sex, Asian race, smaller tumor size, lower tumor grade, and localized disease. Treatment was highly correlated with survival. This was greatest in the transplanted group (1, 3, and 5-year survivals 93%, 79%, and 71%), followed by resection (70%, 45%, and 29%), and ablation (71%, 33%, and 18%). The non-surgical group had poor survival (33%, 9%, and 0%). Conclusions: Transplantation yields excellent survival on a population scale, similar to reported series, and resection gives relatively good outcomes as well. Asians are more likely to be resected and ablated than other groups. They also had better survival than other groups, perhaps due to underlying etiology of HCC (hepatitis B) and better preserved liver function. No significant financial relationships to disclose.


2021 ◽  
pp. OP.21.00274
Author(s):  
Risha Gidwani ◽  
Jeffrey A. Franks ◽  
Ene M. Enogela ◽  
Nicole E. Caston ◽  
Courtney P. Williams ◽  
...  

PURPOSE: Many patient population groups are not proportionally represented in clinical trials, including patients of color, at age extremes, or with comorbidities. It is therefore unclear how treatment outcomes may differ for these patients compared with those who are well-represented in trials. METHODS: This retrospective cohort study included women diagnosed with stage I-III breast cancer between 2005 and 2015 in the national CancerLinQ Discovery electronic medical record–based data set. Patients with comorbidities or concurrent cancer were considered unrepresented in clinical trials. Non-White patients and/or those age < 45 or ≥ 70 years were considered under-represented. Patients who were White, age 45-69 years, and without comorbidities were considered well-represented. Cox proportional hazards models were used to evaluate 5-year mortality by representation group and patient characteristics, adjusting for cancer stage, subtype, chemotherapy, and diagnosis year. RESULTS: Of 11,770 included patients, 48% were considered well-represented in trials, 45% under-represented, and 7% unrepresented. Compared with well-represented patients, unrepresented patients had almost three times the hazard of 5-year mortality (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR], 2.71; 95% CI, 2.08 to 3.52). There were no significant differences in the hazard of 5-year mortality for under-represented patients compared with well-represented patients (aHR, 1.19; 95% CI, 0.98 to 1.45). However, among under-represented patients, those age < 45 years had a lower hazard of 5-year mortality (aHR, 0.63; 95% CI, 0.48 to 0.84) and those age ≥ 70 years had a higher hazard of 5-year mortality (aHR, 2.21; 95% CI, 1.76 to 2.77) compared with those age 45-69 years. CONCLUSION: More than half of the patients were under-represented or unrepresented in clinical trials, because of age, comorbidity, or race. Some of these groups experienced poorer survival compared with those well-represented in trials. Trialists should ensure that study participants reflect the disease population to support evidence-based decision making for all individuals with cancer.


Author(s):  
Chrianna I Bharat ◽  
Kevin Murray ◽  
Edward Cripps ◽  
Melinda R Hodkiewicz

Cox proportional hazards modelling is a widely used technique for determining relationships between observed data and the risk of asset failure when model performance is satisfactory. Cox proportional hazards models possess good explanatory power and are used by asset managers to gain insight into factors influencing asset life. However, validation of Cox proportional hazards models is not straightforward and is seldom considered in the maintenance literature. A comprehensive validation process is a necessary foundation to build trust in the failure models that underpin remaining useful life prediction. This article describes data splitting, model discrimination, misspecification and fit methods necessary to build trust in the ability of a Cox proportional hazards model to predict failures on out-of-sample assets. Specifically, we consider (1) Prognostic Index comparison for training and test sets, (2) Kaplan–Meier curves for different risk bands, (3) hazard ratios across different risk bands and (4) calibration of predictions using cross-validation. A Cox proportional hazards model on an industry data set of water pipe assets is used for illustrative purposes. Furthermore, because we are dealing with a non-statistical managerial audience, we demonstrate how graphical techniques, such as forest plots and nomograms, can be used to present prediction results in an easy to interpret way.


Crisis ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kuan-Ying Lee ◽  
Chung-Yi Li ◽  
Kun-Chia Chang ◽  
Tsung-Hsueh Lu ◽  
Ying-Yeh Chen

Abstract. Background: We investigated the age at exposure to parental suicide and the risk of subsequent suicide completion in young people. The impact of parental and offspring sex was also examined. Method: Using a cohort study design, we linked Taiwan's Birth Registry (1978–1997) with Taiwan's Death Registry (1985–2009) and identified 40,249 children who had experienced maternal suicide (n = 14,431), paternal suicide (n = 26,887), or the suicide of both parents (n = 281). Each exposed child was matched to 10 children of the same sex and birth year whose parents were still alive. This yielded a total of 398,081 children for our non-exposed cohort. A Cox proportional hazards model was used to compare the suicide risk of the exposed and non-exposed groups. Results: Compared with the non-exposed group, offspring who were exposed to parental suicide were 3.91 times (95% confidence interval [CI] = 3.10–4.92 more likely to die by suicide after adjusting for baseline characteristics. The risk of suicide seemed to be lower in older male offspring (HR = 3.94, 95% CI = 2.57–6.06), but higher in older female offspring (HR = 5.30, 95% CI = 3.05–9.22). Stratified analyses based on parental sex revealed similar patterns as the combined analysis. Limitations: As only register-­based data were used, we were not able to explore the impact of variables not contained in the data set, such as the role of mental illness. Conclusion: Our findings suggest a prominent elevation in the risk of suicide among offspring who lost their parents to suicide. The risk elevation differed according to the sex of the afflicted offspring as well as to their age at exposure.


JAMIA Open ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Spiros Denaxas ◽  
Anoop D Shah ◽  
Bilal A Mateen ◽  
Valerie Kuan ◽  
Jennifer K Quint ◽  
...  

Abstract Objectives The UK Biobank (UKB) is making primary care electronic health records (EHRs) for 500 000 participants available for COVID-19-related research. Data are extracted from four sources, recorded using five clinical terminologies and stored in different schemas. The aims of our research were to: (a) develop a semi-supervised approach for bootstrapping EHR phenotyping algorithms in UKB EHR, and (b) to evaluate our approach by implementing and evaluating phenotypes for 31 common biomarkers. Materials and Methods We describe an algorithmic approach to phenotyping biomarkers in primary care EHR involving (a) bootstrapping definitions using existing phenotypes, (b) excluding generic, rare, or semantically distant terms, (c) forward-mapping terminology terms, (d) expert review, and (e) data extraction. We evaluated the phenotypes by assessing the ability to reproduce known epidemiological associations with all-cause mortality using Cox proportional hazards models. Results We created and evaluated phenotyping algorithms for 31 biomarkers many of which are directly related to COVID-19 complications, for example diabetes, cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease. Our algorithm identified 1651 Read v2 and Clinical Terms Version 3 terms and automatically excluded 1228 terms. Clinical review excluded 103 terms and included 44 terms, resulting in 364 terms for data extraction (sensitivity 0.89, specificity 0.92). We extracted 38 190 682 events and identified 220 978 participants with at least one biomarker measured. Discussion and conclusion Bootstrapping phenotyping algorithms from similar EHR can potentially address pre-existing methodological concerns that undermine the outputs of biomarker discovery pipelines and provide research-quality phenotyping algorithms.


Cancers ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 1177
Author(s):  
In Young Choi ◽  
Sohyun Chun ◽  
Dong Wook Shin ◽  
Kyungdo Han ◽  
Keun Hye Jeon ◽  
...  

Objective: To our knowledge, no studies have yet looked at how the risk of developing breast cancer (BC) varies with changes in metabolic syndrome (MetS) status. This study aimed to investigate the association between changes in MetS and subsequent BC occurrence. Research Design and Methods: We enrolled 930,055 postmenopausal women aged 40–74 years who participated in a biennial National Health Screening Program in 2009–2010 and 2011–2012. Participants were categorized into four groups according to change in MetS status during the two-year interval screening: sustained non-MetS, transition to MetS, transition to non-MetS, and sustained MetS. We calculated multivariable-adjusted hazard ratios (aHRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for BC incidence using the Cox proportional hazards models. Results: At baseline, MetS was associated with a significantly increased risk of BC (aHR 1.11, 95% CI 1.06–1.17) and so were all of its components. The risk of BC increased as the number of the components increased (aHR 1.46, 95% CI 1.26–1.61 for women with all five components). Compared to the sustained non-MetS group, the aHR (95% CI) for BC was 1.11 (1.04–1.19) in the transition to MetS group, 1.05 (0.96–1.14) in the transition to non-MetS group, and 1.18 (1.12–1.25) in the sustained MetS group. Conclusions: Significantly increased BC risk was observed in the sustained MetS and transition to MetS groups. These findings are clinically meaningful in that efforts to recover from MetS may lead to reduced risk of BC.


Author(s):  
Laurie Grieshober ◽  
Stefan Graw ◽  
Matt J. Barnett ◽  
Gary E. Goodman ◽  
Chu Chen ◽  
...  

Abstract Purpose The neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) is a marker of systemic inflammation that has been reported to be associated with survival after chronic disease diagnoses, including lung cancer. We hypothesized that the inflammatory profile reflected by pre-diagnosis NLR, rather than the well-studied pre-treatment NLR at diagnosis, may be associated with increased mortality after lung cancer is diagnosed in high-risk heavy smokers. Methods We examined associations between pre-diagnosis methylation-derived NLR (mdNLR) and lung cancer-specific and all-cause mortality in 279 non-small lung cancer (NSCLC) and 81 small cell lung cancer (SCLC) cases from the β-Carotene and Retinol Efficacy Trial (CARET). Cox proportional hazards models were adjusted for age, sex, smoking status, pack years, and time between blood draw and diagnosis, and stratified by stage of disease. Models were run separately by histotype. Results Among SCLC cases, those with pre-diagnosis mdNLR in the highest quartile had 2.5-fold increased mortality compared to those in the lowest quartile. For each unit increase in pre-diagnosis mdNLR, we observed 22–23% increased mortality (SCLC-specific hazard ratio [HR] = 1.23, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.02, 1.48; all-cause HR = 1.22, 95% CI 1.01, 1.46). SCLC associations were strongest for current smokers at blood draw (Interaction Ps = 0.03). Increasing mdNLR was not associated with mortality among NSCLC overall, nor within adenocarcinoma (N = 148) or squamous cell carcinoma (N = 115) case groups. Conclusion Our findings suggest that increased mdNLR, representing a systemic inflammatory profile on average 4.5 years before a SCLC diagnosis, may be associated with mortality in heavy smokers who go on to develop SCLC but not NSCLC.


2021 ◽  
pp. 000348942110081
Author(s):  
Sara Behbahani ◽  
Gregory L. Barinsky ◽  
David Wassef ◽  
Boris Paskhover ◽  
Rachel Kaye

Objective: Primary tracheal malignancies are relatively rare cancers, representing 0.1% to 0.4% of all malignancies. Adenoid cystic carcinoma (ACC) is the second most common histology of primary tracheal malignancy, after squamous cell carcinoma. This study aims to analyze demographic characteristics and potential influencing factors on survival of tracheal ACC (TACC). Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study utilizing the National Cancer Database (NCDB). The NCDB was queried for all cases of TACC diagnosed from 2004 to 2016 (n = 394). Kaplan-Meier (KM) and Cox proportional-hazards models were used to determine clinicopathological and treatment factors associated with survival outcomes. Results: Median age of diagnosis was 56 (IQR: 44.75-66.00). Females were affected slightly more than males (53.8% vs 46.2%). The most prevalent tumor diameter range was 20 to 39 mm (34.8%) followed by greater than 40 mm in diameter (17.8%). Median overall survival (OS) was 9.72 years with a 5- and 10-year OS of 70% and 47.5%, respectively. Localized disease was not associated with a survival benefit over invasive disease ( P = .388). The most common intervention was surgery combined with radiation therapy (RT) at 46.2%, followed by surgery alone (16.8%), and standalone RT (8.9%). When adjusting for confounders, surgical resection was independently associated with improved OS (HR 0.461, 95% CI 0.225-0.946). Tumor size greater than 40 mm was independently associated with worse OS (HR 2.808; 95% CI 1.096-7.194). Conclusion: Our data suggests that surgical resection, possibly in conjunction with radiation therapy, is associated with improved survival, and tumor larger than 40 mm are associated with worse survival.


Author(s):  
Anne Høye ◽  
Bjarne K. Jacobsen ◽  
Jørgen G. Bramness ◽  
Ragnar Nesvåg ◽  
Ted Reichborn-Kjennerud ◽  
...  

Abstract Purpose To investigate the mortality in both in- and outpatients with personality disorders (PD), and to explore the association between mortality and comorbid substance use disorder (SUD) or severe mental illness (SMI). Methods All residents admitted to Norwegian in- and outpatient specialist health care services during 2009–2015 with a PD diagnosis were included. Standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) were estimated in patients with PD only and in patients with PD and comorbid SMI or SUD. Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% CIs in patients with PD and comorbid SMI or SUD compared to patients with PD only. Results Mortality was increased in both in- and outpatients with PD. The overall SMR was 3.8 (95% CI 3.6–4.0). The highest SMR was estimated for unnatural causes of death (11.0, 95% CI 10.0–12.0), but increased also for natural causes of death (2.2, 95% CI 2.0–2.5). Comorbidity was associated with higher SMRs, particularly due to poisoning and suicide. Patients with comorbid PD & SUD had almost four times higher all-cause mortality HR than patients with PD only; young women had the highest HR. Conclusion The SMR was high in both in- and outpatients with PD, and particularly high in patients with comorbid PD & SUD. Young female patients with PD & SUD were at highest risk. The higher mortality in patients with PD cannot, however, fully be accounted for by comorbidity.


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