Epidemiology
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The net impact on population health and health system costs of vaporized nicotine products is uncertain. We modeled, with uncertainty, the health and cost impacts of liberalizing the vaporized nicotine market for a high-income country, New Zealand (NZ). ⋯ This modeling suggested that a fairly permissive regulatory environment around vaporized nicotine products achieves net health gain and cost savings, albeit with wide uncertainty. Our results suggest that optimal strategies will also be influenced by targeted smoking cessation advice, regulations around chemical constituents of these products, and marketing and age limits to prevent youth uptake of vaping.
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Mendelian randomization studies commonly focus on elderly populations. This makes the instrumental variables analysis of such studies sensitive to survivor bias, a type of selection bias. ⋯ Interestingly, the instrumental variable conditions continue to hold within certain risk sets of individuals who are still alive at a given age when the instrument and unmeasured confounders exert additive effects on the exposure, and moreover, the exposure and unmeasured confounders exert additive effects on the hazard of death. In this article, we will exploit this property to derive a two-stage instrumental variable estimator for the effect of exposure on mortality, which is insulated against the above described selection bias under these additivity assumptions.
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This study investigates whether assault frequency increased on days and in cities where candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton held campaign rallies prior to the 2016 US Presidential election. ⋯ Assaults increased on days when cities hosted Donald Trump's rallies during the 2016 Presidential election campaign.
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Flexible sigmoidoscopy and fecal immunochemical tests are established diagnostic tests for colorectal cancer (CRC) screening and less invasive, less expensive, and easier to conduct than colonoscopy. However, little is known about their joint diagnostic performance compared with colonoscopy. We aimed to assess the expected diagnostic performance of joint use of flexible sigmoidoscopy and fecal immunochemical test. ⋯ Combining flexible sigmoidoscopy and fecal immunochemical testing might strongly enhance diagnostic performance of each single test to a level close to the diagnostic performance of screening colonoscopy while avoiding many unnecessary colonoscopies.
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Early-life exposure to traffic-related air pollution exacerbates childhood asthma, but it is unclear what role it plays in asthma development. ⋯ Results provide limited evidence for an association of early-life mobile source air pollution with childhood asthma incidence with a steeper concentration-response relationship observed at lower levels of exposure.