Important aspects of palliative home care as providing a secure base were identified and these have implications for clinical practice.

The main findings provide tools for the practitioner to identify situations contributing to next of kin's sense of powerlessness and helplessness. The findings are discussed in relation to the concepts of symptom control, communication of awareness and humans' search for action.

Using a sample of 96 mergers notified to the European Commission and logit regression techniques, we analyse the Commission's decision process. We find that the probability of a phase-2 investigation and of a prohibition of the merger increases with the parties' market shares. The probabilities increase also when the Commission finds high entry barriers or that the post-merger market structure is conducive to collusion. We do not find significant effects of bpoliticalQ variables, such as the nationality of the merging firms. D

Palliative care does not end with the death of the patient, and many palliative care services offer specific follow-up services for the bereaved. The aims of this study were to quantitate perceived bereavement needs and to qualitatively describe these needs. The study design was cross-sectional and targeted family members three to nine months after the patient's death. Two hundred and forty-eight family members responded (response rate 66%) to a postal questionnaire with Likert-type and open-ended questions. The responses to the open-ended items were analyzed with manifest content analysis, and the quantitative part was analyzed with descriptive statistics. The analysis showed that about half of the family members expressed a need for bereavement follow-up. A majority favored a personal meeting, preferably in their own home, with the staff member who had had the most contact with the patient and the family. The family members wanted to talk about what had happened during the palliative phase (e.g., if the patient had suffered or not), and also about their present situation, their feelings of loneliness, and the future. The follow-up procedure made the family member experience a feeling of being recognized as a person with their own needs and was also valuable with regard to the family members' feelings of guilt. The findings are discussed in relation to narrative theory, meaning-based coping, and the dual process model of coping with bereavement, and designing follow-up procedures.

Background:This retrospective register study assessed overall survival (OS) and influential factors on OS in Swedish renal cell carcinoma (RCC) patients.Methods:Using three merged national health registers, Cox proportional-hazards analysis was conducted and, in three models, it was used to assess the impact of cytokine (interferon-α and tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI; sunitinib or sorafenib) treatment on OS in metastatic (m)RCC.Results:From 2000 to 2008, 8009 patients were diagnosed with RCC and 2753 with mRCC (2002–2008). Median OS in RCC patients diagnosed from 2006 to 2008 compared with 2000–2005 was not reached vs 47.9 months (P<0.001), and in mRCC patients diagnosed from 2006 to 2008 compared with 2002–2005, was 12.4 vs 9.6 months, respectively (P=0.004). Factors associated with significantly improved OS in RCC were female gender, lower age, and previous nephrectomy, and, in mRCC female gender, previous nephrectomy, and any TKI prescription (Model 1: median-adjusted OS, 19.4 months (TKI patients) vs 9.7 months (non-TKI patients); hazard ratio, 0.621; P<0.001).Conclusion:OS was improved in Swedish patients diagnosed with RCC and mRCC in the period 2006–2008 compared with 2000–2005 (RCC) and 2002–2005 (mRCC). Although multifactorial in origin, results suggest that increased nephrectomy rates and the use of TKIs contributed to the improvement seen in mRCC patients.

Antitrust, Comparative regulatory policy, Merger policy, Oaxaca decomposition, L44, K21,

These findings stress the importance of palliative care services in supporting dying patients' sense of security through symptom management with a wide scope and through supporting the patients' sense of mastery, identity, and perception of a secure care interaction and also through attention to the family members' situation.

Since 1985 a Swedish National Care Programme has provided tailored principles for the diagnosis, staging, treatment and follow-up of patients with Hodgkin's disease (HD). This report gives the rationale behind the recommendations and presents treatment results for 648 patients diagnosed between 1985 and 1989 after a median follow-up of 70 months. Two hundred and twenty-nine (35%) patients were over 60 years of age. Treatment results for patients below 60 years of age in early and intermediate stages were favourable, provided the recommendations were followed. In advanced stages, the outcome was inferior in patients with CS IIB bulky disease and stage IVB. The prognosis of elderly patients remains poor, although it is too early to evaluate any impact of revisions made in 1989. The tailored principles, which usually entail less staging and/or treatment than is generally the case in the early and intermediate stages, produced favourable results when applied to an unselected group of patients with HD. Only minor changes were made in the recommendations during the 1994 revision.