The indication for the use of oral implants should sometimes be reconsidered when alternative prosthetic treatments are available in the presence of possibly interfering systemic or local factors.

Implant location in the oral cavity and radiotherapy seem predominant to explain the occurrence of implant loss. On the other hand, smoking and systemic health factors do not seem to be prominent players in the etiology of late implant loss.

Key PointsQuestionIn patients with witnessed refractory out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, does early intra-arrest transport, extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and invasive assessment and treatment improve outcomes compared with standard resuscitation?FindingsIn this randomized clinical trial that included 256 patients, survival with neurologically favorable outcome (Cerebral Performance Category 1-2) at 180 days occurred in 31.5% in the invasive strategy group and 22.0% in the standard resuscitation group, a difference that was not statistically significant.MeaningAmong patients with refractory out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, the bundle of early intra-arrest transport, extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and invasive assessment and treatment did not significantly improve survival with neurologically favorable outcome at 180 days compared with standard resuscitation, although the trial was possibly underpowered to detect a clinically relevant difference.

A global failure rate of 1.9% was recorded. Owing to the very few failures, no definitive conclusion concerning statistical significance can be achieved. However, a tendency for more failures was noticed for apical lesions, vicinity with natural dentition, smoking, hormone replacement, gastric problems, Crohn's disease, diabetes I and radical hysterectomy.

During a median follow up of 2 years sustained response to infliximab was observed in slightly more than half of CD patients. Infliximab TL>3μg/ml at the start of maintenance regime were predicative of sustained response to infliximab.

This article develops a semiparametric procedure to estimate parameters of an accelerated failure time model. To express the density of the error distribution, we use the P-spline (B-splines with penalties) smoothing technique. To accommodate error densities with infinite support (and for other reasons) we replace the B-splines with their limits as the degree of the B-spline goes to infinity; namely, with normal densities. The spline coefficients as well as any number of regression parameters are quickly and accurately estimated via penalized maximum likelihood. The method directly provides predictive survival distributions for fixed values of covariates while allowing for left-, right-, and interval-censored data. The approach has been implemented as an R package and is applied here to the problem of predicting AIDS-free survival in the presence of interval censoring.

Multiple outcomes, both continuous and discrete, are routinely gathered on subjects in longitudinal studies and during routine clinical follow-up in general. To motivate our work, we consider a longitudinal study on patients with primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) with a continuous bilirubin level, a discrete platelet count and a dichotomous indication of blood vessel malformations as examples of such longitudinal outcomes. An apparent requirement is to use all the outcome values to classify the subjects into groups (e.g., groups of subjects with a similar prognosis in a clinical setting). In recent years, numerous approaches have been suggested for classification based on longitudinal (or otherwise correlated) outcomes, targeting not only traditional areas like biostatistics, but also rapidly evolving bioinformatics and many others. However, most available approaches consider only continuous outcomes as a basis for classification, or if noncontinuous outcomes are considered, then not in combination with other outcomes of a different nature. Here, we propose a statistical method for clustering (classification) of subjects into a prespecified number of groups with a priori unknown characteristics on the basis of repeated measurements of several longitudinal outcomes of a different nature. This method relies on a multivariate extension of the classical generalized linear mixed model where a mixture distribution is additionally assumed for random effects. We base the inference on a Bayesian specification of the model and simulation-based Markov chain Monte Carlo methodology. To apply the method in practice, we have prepared ready-to-use software for use in R (http://www.R-project.org). We also discuss evaluation of uncertainty in the classification and also discuss usage of a recently proposed methodology for model comparison - the selection of a number of clusters in our case - based on the penalized posterior deviance proposed by Plummer [Biostatistics 9 (2008) 523-539].Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOAS580 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Childhood sexual and physical abuse have been linked to adolescent and adult risky sexual behaviors, including early sexual debut, an increased number of sexual partners, unprotected sex, alcohol and drug use during sex and sexual violence. This paper explores these relationships among both men and women who report histories of childhood abuse from representative samples of communities in three countries in southern and eastern Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Tanzania). Data were collected as part of a 3-year randomized community trial to rapidly increase knowledge of HIV status and to promote community responses through mobilisation, mobile testing, provision of same-day HIV test results and post-test support for HIV. The results indicate that reported childhood sexual and physical abuse is high in all three settings, also among men, and shows strong relationships with a range of sexual risk behaviors, including age at first sex (OR −0.6 (CI: −0.9, −0.4, p<0.003)—among men, OR −0.7 (CI: −0.9, −0.5, p<0.001)—among women), alcohol (OR 1.43 (CI: 1.22, 1.68, p<0.001)—men,OR1.83 (CI: 1.50, 2.24, p<0.001)— women) and drug use (OR 1.65 (CI: 1.38, 1.97, p<0.001)— men, OR 3.14 (CI: 1.95, 5.05, p<0.001)—women) and two forms of partner violence—recent forced sex (OR 2.22 (CI: 1.66, 2.95, p<0.001)—men, OR 2.76 (CI: 2.09, 3.64, p<0.001)—women) and ever being hurt by a partner (OR 3.88 (CI: 2.84, 5.29, p<0.001)—men, OR 3.06 (CI: 2.48, 3.76, p<0.001)—women). Individuals abused in childhood comprise between 6 and 29 % of young adult men and women living in these African settings and constitute a population at high risk of HIV infection.