"Traditionally, estimates of the number of people in small areas (the smallest geographical units for which data are available) have been disaggregated only by age and sex. More recently, much research effort has been directed towards developing some form of enhanced small-area population estimation, in which the population in a small area is disaggregated not only by age and sex, but also by a wide range of additional economic and social characteristics. Solutions to this problem currently include account-based demographic models, often used by local authorities."

This early experience seems to indicate that laparoscopic surgery for colorectal carcinoma does not per se compromise surgical oncologic principles and encourages us to continue our critical appraisal of this technique.

Notwithstanding the drawbacks of a nonrandomized study, no adverse long-term oncologic outcomes of laparoscopic resections for colorectal cancer were observed in a single center's experience during a ten-year period.

Population microdata comprise a list of households and individuals, each with an associated list of characteristics. Unfortunately, for Britain no small‐area microdata exist that offer the broad range of demographic and socio‐economic variables contained in the national census. There are a number of approaches to the reconstruction of such spatially detailed microdata, including data fusion, synthetic reconstruction (chain imputation) and reweighting. One variant of the reweighting approach involves the selection of a combination of households from the 1% household SAR that best fits known small‐area constraints (the published census tabulations). In this paper the implementation of this ‘combinatorial optimisation’ technique is more thoroughly examined. First the combinatorial optimisation process is reviewed. Then a number of methodological innovations, designed to improve the accuracy and consistency of resulting outputs, are reported. Subsequently the problems of evaluating the outputs are discussed and a new strategy is outlined for assessing the quality of synthetic microdata. The strategy proposed is generally applicable to all such data, irrespective of their means of generation. The paper goes on to provide an extensive assessment of the quality of synthetic microdata produced using the combinatorial optimisation approach. This represents the first time that such an evaluation has ever been undertaken. The results highlight the degree to which such data may be able to meet specific user needs. The paper concludes by offering an illustration of the ‘added value’ that can be obtained by combining information from public‐use microdata with published small‐area tabulations. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

No abstract

Early aggressive surgical management of suppurative complications of perianal Crohn's disease before complex management problems ensue results in a high incidence of healing and a low risk of subsequent proctectomy.

The paper considers the scale -the measure, extent, and dimension -of uneven distributions in space for a wide range of census variables. While the traditional 'index of dissimilarity' is affected by random as well as social factors, a solution presented here allows the index to be calculated even for very small populations. Small areas across England and Wales tend to be fairly similar demographically but quite diverse on ethnic and socio-economic measures. Differences between areas become more noticeable as we move from districts, to wards, to enumeration districts, but the rate of differentiation depends heavily on the variables considered. key words: England and Wales census dissimilarity segregation index scale

When consistently applied, Seprafilm significantly decreased adhesion formation around the stoma but not operative times without any increase in the need for myotomy or enterotomy. These findings were not seen in the overall study population possibly due to the large number of surgeons using a variety of application techniques.