Hierarchical rank ordering by comparative efficacy and risk of all-cause discontinuations should help to guide antimanic treatment choices by clinicians, healthcare policy makers, and guideline developers.

The need to support clinical decision making and cost-effectiveness analyses in medicine, despite a dearth of head-to-head treatment comparisons, has encouraged the development of methods enabling indirect comparisons of treatment alternatives, including network meta-analysis (NMA). Valid application of NMA requires close similarity of compared trials, including their design, patient characteristics, and methods of diagnosis and symptomatic assessment. When biological or other objective measures of outcomes are not available, as is the case in psychiatric disorders, subtle differences in characteristics of trials or participants may lead to unrecognized incoherence within a network and thus to inconsistent results. By considering comparative-efficacy analyses of psychotropic drugs in major psychiatric disorders as working examples, we underscore the risks of violating the fundamental transitivity assumption in the context of NMA and suggest precautions for creating a coherent network. We conclude that with thoughtful and critical application, NMA can add useful information concerning the comparative benefits, risks, and costs of specific treatments in psychiatry.

The approach allows quantification and visualization of benefit-risk over time and across comparators. Combination of pragmatic MCDA designed to integrate criteria beyond benefit-risk and advanced statistics supports application of MCDA to further accountable benefit-risk assessments for real-life decision making.

Background This meta-analysis evaluated the real-world effectiveness of onabotulinumtoxinA (BOTOX®), the first preventive treatment FDA-approved specifically for chronic migraine in 2010. Methods We systematically reviewed onabotulinumtoxinA observational data in chronic migraine published between 1 January 2010 and 31 March 2021. Random-effects models evaluated available data for primary and secondary endpoints defined in onabotulinumtoxinA pivotal trials at approximately 24 weeks and 52 weeks. Results Of the 44 full-text eligible studies (29 prospective; 13 retrospective; 2 other), seven evaluated change from baseline (mean[confidence interval]) at ∼24 weeks and ∼52 weeks, respectively, for onabotulinumtoxinA in: number of headache days/month: (–10.64 [–12.31, –8.97]; –10.32 [−14.92, –5.73]); number of days of acute headache pain medication intake per month (–7.40 [–13.04, –1.77]; overlapping CIs at 52 weeks); total Headache Impact Test-6 score (–11.70 [–13.86, –9.54]); –11.80 [14.70, –8.90]); and Migraine-Specific Quality-of-Life v2.1 score (MSQ; 23.60 [CI: 21.56, 25.64]; 30.90 [CI: 28.29, 33.51]). At ∼24 weeks onabotulinumtoxinA showed total Migraine Disability Assessment score of 44.74 [28.50, 60.99] and ≥50% reduction in migraine days response rate of 46.57% [29.50%, 63.65%]. A sensitivity analysis at study-end suggested durability of onabotulinumtoxinA effectiveness on MSQ. Conclusion The meta-analysis reflecting real-world practice broadly corroborated with evidence from pivotal and long-term open-label studies of onabotulinumtoxinA in chronic migraine preventive treatment.

Abstract. Given a convex subset D of a vector space and a constant t ∈ (0,1) , a function f :The following Kuhn-type theorem is proved: If f is t -quasiconvex and strictly t -quasiconvex then it is (1/2) -quasiconvex and strictly (1/2) -quasiconvex. It is also shown that lower semicontinuous strictly t -quasiconvex functions are quasiconvex, which generalizes the well-known Karamardian's theorem. Mathematics subject classification (2000): Primary 26A51, 39B62.

We develop the problem of fault-tolerant dominating sets (liar's dominating sets) in graphs. Namely, we consider a new kind of fault - a false alarm. Characterization of such fault-tolerant dominating sets in three different cases (dependent on the classification of the types of the faults) are presented

Objectives This review intends to provide an overview of revealed preferences of decision-makers for recommendations of cancer drugs in health technology assessment (HTA) among the different agencies. Methods A systematic literature search was performed in MEDLINE and EMBASE databases from inception to July 2020. The studies were eligible for inclusion if they conducted a quantitative analysis of HTA’s previous decisions for cancer drugs. The factors with p-values below the significance level of .05 were considered as the statistically significant factors for HTA decisions. Results A total of nine studies for six agencies in Australia, Belgium, France, South Korea, the UK, and Canada were eligible to be included. From the univariable analysis, improvements in clinical outcomes and cost-effectiveness were found as significant factors for the agencies in Belgium, South Korea, and Canada. From the multivariable analysis, cost-effectiveness was found as a positive factor for the agencies in the UK, South Korea, and Canada. Few factors related to characteristics of disease and technology were found to be significant among the included agencies. Conclusions Despite the different drug reimbursement systems and the socioeconomic situations, cost-effectiveness and/or improvement on clinical outcomes seemed to be the most important factors for recommendations of cancer drugs among the agencies.

A distance magic labeling of a graph G = (V, E) with |V | = n is a bijection ℓ from V to the set {1,. .. , n} such that the weight w(x) = y∈NG(x) ℓ(y) of every vertex x ∈ V is equal to the same element µ, called the magic constant. In this paper, we study unions of distance magic graphs as well as some properties of such graphs.