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Background: Using 7-year population-based data on Taiwan, we examined seasonal variation in violent versus nonviolent suicide, and its association with meteorological factors: ambient temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, rainfall and daily sunshine hours. Methods: We used Taiwan’s nationwide mortality data from 1997 to 2003, categorizing the sample decedents into two groups, violent (ICD-9-CM codes E953–E958) and nonviolent (E950–E952) suicide, based on the suicide method used. Seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) modeling was used to detect seasonality of suicide, and the association of climate variables with violent versus nonviolent suicide. Results: The SARIMA test of seasonality was significant for both genders and the pooled sample (all p < 0.001) in violent suicide deaths, but not nonviolent suicides. Seasonal trends show a significant peak in March–May (early to late spring) for violent suicides. Increasing ambient temperature predicted increasing violent suicide rates. Conclusions: We conclude that seasonality exists in violent but not nonviolent suicide rates. Our findings suggest that suicide is a heterogeneous phenomenon and violent suicide may be more influenced by biochemical and chronobiological mechanisms.

This study aims to explore the prevalence of strokes among individuals and the association with urbanization levels. A total sample of 9,794 individuals was obtained from a nationwide survey on Taiwan for subsequent analysis in this study. After adjusting for gender, age, other risk factors for stroke and individual socioeconomic status, a multivariate logistic regression model was employed to investigate the relationships existing between the prevalence of strokes and the level of urbanization. This study finds that those living in areas at the highest level of urbanization (level 1) had the highest prevalence of strokes (2.49%). With decreasing urbanization level, there was a general decline in stroke prevalence. After adjusting for other factors, the multivariate logistic regression analyses showed that compared to participants living in the highest urbanization level, the respective odds ratios of suffering a stroke for those living in areas at the lowest levels of urbanization (levels 7 and 8), were 0.43 and 0.30. We conclude that after adjusting for other stroke risk factors, the level of urbanization is an important contributory factor to the overall prevalence of strokes in Taiwan.

We conclude that seasonal variations do exist in the monthly urinary calculi attack rates for all age and gender populations, and that following time series statistical adjustment, only ambient temperature had any consistent association with monthly attack rates.

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Background: Unequal geographical distribution of medical care resources and insufficient healthcare coverage have been two long-standing problems with Taiwan's public health system. The implementation of National Health Insurance (NHI) attempted to mitigate the inequality in health care use. This study examines the degree to which Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI) has reduced out-of-pocket medical expenditures in households in different regions and varying levels of income.

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This study sets out to examine the relationship between both surgeon and hospital volume and five-year survival rates for breast cancer patients. We performed Cox proportional hazard regressions on a pooled population-based database linking the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database with the 'cause of death' data file, covering the three-year period from January 1997 to December 1999. Of the 13,360 breast cancer resection patients in our study sample, the five-year survival rates, by surgeon volume, were 77.3% in the high-volume group (>201 cases), 76.9% in the medium-volume group (45-200), and 69.5% in the low-volume group (585 cases), 74.5% for medium-volume hospitals (259-585) and 72.1% for low-volume hospitals (