Objective
There is limited evidence on whether growing mobile phone availability in sub-Saharan Africa can be used to promote high adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART). This study tested the efficacy of short message service (SMS) reminders on adherence to ART among patients attending a rural clinic in Kenya.
Design
A randomized controlled trial of four SMS reminder interventions with 48 weeks of follow-up.
Methods
Four hundred and thirty-one adult patients who had initiated ART within 3 months were enrolled and randomly assigned to a control group or one of the four intervention groups. Participants in the intervention groups received SMS reminders that were either short or long and sent at a daily or weekly frequency. Adherence was measured using the medication event monitoring system. The primary outcome was whether adherence exceeded 90% during each 12-week period of analysis and the 48-week study period. The secondary outcome was whether there were treatment interruptions lasting at least 48 h.
Results
In intention-to-treat analysis, 53% of participants receiving weekly SMS reminders achieved adherence of at least 90% during the 48 weeks of the study, compared with 40% of participants in the control group (P=0.03). Participants in groups receiving weekly reminders were also significantly less likely to experience treatment interruptions exceeding 48 h during the 48-week follow-up period than participants in the control group (81 vs. 90%, P = 0.03).
Conclusion
These results suggest that SMS reminders may be an important tool to achieve optimal treatment response in resource-limited settings.
Pharmacist-provided direct patient care has favorable effects across various patient outcomes, health care settings, and disease states. Incorporating pharmacists as health care team members in direct patient care is a viable solution to help improve US health care.
We estimate the magnitude of spillovers generated by 112 academic "superstars" who died prematurely and unexpectedly, thus providing an exogenous source of variation in the structure of their collaborators' coauthorship networks. Following the death of a superstar, we find that collaborators experience, on average, a lasting 5% to 8% decline in their quality-adjusted publication rates. By exploring interactions of the treatment effect with a variety of star, coauthor, and star/coauthor dyad characteristics, we seek to adjudicate between plausible mechanisms that might explain this finding. Taken together, our results suggest that spillovers are circumscribed in idea space, but less so in physical or social space. In particular, superstar extinction reveals the boundaries of the scientific field to which the star contributes-the "invisible college." "Greater is the merit of the person who facilitates the accomplishments of others than of the person who accomplishes himself."Rabbi Eliezer, Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Baba Bathra 9a
This paper tests the hypothesis that freedom to experiment, tolerance for early failure, long time horizons to evaluate results, and detailed feedback on performance stimulate creativity and innovation in scientific research. We do so by studying the careers and output of U.S. academic life scientists funded through two very distinct mechanisms: investigator-initiated R01 grants from the NIH, or appointment as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), whose funding practices embody many of the elements mentioned above. Using careful adjustment for selection on observables, we find that HHMI investigators produce high-impact papers at a much higher rate than two control groups of similarly-accomplished NIH-funded scientists. In contrast, the program does not appear to have much effect on the raw number of articles published. We also observe large effects on the probability of being elected to prestigious scientific societies or the training of students that go on to win early career prizes.
In this paper we estimate the impacts of climate change on the allocation of time using econometric models that exploit plausibly exogenous variation in daily temperature over time within counties. We find large reductions in U.S. labor supply in industries with high exposure to climate and similarly large decreases in time allocated to outdoor leisure. We also find suggestive evidence of short-run adaptation through temporal substitutions and acclimatization. Given the industrial composition of the US, the net impacts on total employment are likely to be small, but significant changes in leisure time as well as large scale redistributions of income may be consequential. In developing countries, where the industrial base is more typically concentrated in climate-exposed industries and baseline temperatures are already warmer, employment impacts may be considerably larger.
Hypnosis was superior to attention control regarding propofol and lidocaine use; pain, nausea, fatigue, discomfort, and emotional upset at discharge; and institutional cost. Overall, the present data support the use of hypnosis with breast cancer surgery patients.
This study demonstrated that gluten-free foods have poor availability and are more expensive than their gluten-containing counterparts. The impact of these findings on dietary compliance and the quality of life needs to be addressed.
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