BackgroundThis study adapts the ICECAP measure for Adults (ICECAP-A) to assess its capacity to measure the quality of life in China for economic evaluation.MethodsQualitative and quantitative methods were used to translate the ICECAP-A measure for wellbeing, established by the University of Birmingham, UK, to the Chinese cultural context. A focus group discussion solved the appropriateness and wording of the ICECAP attributes in Chinese; and a randomly selected sample of 1000 adults aged over 18 years were online surveyed. We conducted psychometric tests and compared the factors influencing the ICECAP-A measure with those influencing EQ-5D-3 L.ResultsMembers of the focus group discussion agreed that the five attributes of the ICECAP-A measure are sufficient to evaluate wellbeing in China. However, the terms “being settled” and “friendship” were changed to “stability” and “kindness” for the Chinese cultural context. Our results show that the Chinese version of ICECAP-A has good internal consistency with an overall Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient of 0.7999. The concurrent validity indicates that ICECAP-A is moderately correlated with EQ-5D-3 L (r ≤ 0.52).ConclusionsThe ICECAP-A measure can be adapted to evaluate wellbeing in China, but cultural changes to the wording are necessary. It is a valid measurement of wellbeing and can complement the EQ-5D already used in China. However, further work is still needed to evaluate the sensitivity of the ICECAP-A measure in relation to public health and social care.

Purpose We aimed to conduct psychometric tests for the Chinese version of ICECAP-A and compare the differences between ICECAP-A and EQ-5D-3L for patients with T2DM and explore the relationship between clinical conditions and ICECAP-A through diabetes-related clinical indicators. Methods Data were collected from a sample of 492 Chinese T2DM patients. The reliability and validity of the ICECAP-A were verified. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA), correlation analysis and regression analysis were conducted for both the ICECAP-A and EQ-5D-3L. Results Our results show that the Chinese version of ICECAP-A has good internal consistency with an overall Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient of 0.721. The mean scores of ICECAP-A and EQ-5D-3L are 0.85 vs. 0.94. A weak correlation (r = 0.116) was found between the ICECAP-A tariff and EQ-5D-3L utility. EFA showed that although the five dimensions of the ICECAP-A and EQ-5D-3L scales were loaded into two different factors respectively. However, the two scales captured different dimensions of quality of life and can complement each other. The ICECAP-A, EQ-5D-3L, and EQ-VAS scores showed differences across different socio-demographic characteristics and clinic conditions groups. Conclusion The Chinese version of the ICECAP-A capability instrument can be for assessing outcomes in adults with T2DM. It may capture more dimensions of QoL than traditional Health-related QoL (HRQoL) instruments and may be useful for economic evaluations of health care and social care for people with T2DM or other chronic diseases.

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Background:The Chinese government removed the price ceiling of most drugs in June 2015 to establish a marketdriven pricing system. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of the elimination of drug ceiling price (EDCP) policy on drug prices.Methods: Using a national macro-level dataset, we employed an interrupted time series method to study the abrupt level and gradual trend changes of Chinese and Western medicine consumer price index (CPI) between June 2014 and June 2017. Results:The policy exerted level change on Chinese medicine CPI, increasing 0.201% (95% CI 0.026% to 0.376%, p = 0.026). And the trend in Chinese medicine CPI was still decreased nonsignificantly after the EDCP policy. However, there was no significant price change in Western medicine. Conclusion:The EDCP policy has different effects on the prices of Chinese and Western medicines. Therefore, we need to pay more attention to the drug pricing mechanism in the future. K E Y W O R D S ceiling price, drug price, interrupted time series, price index 1 | BACKGROUND With the gradual marketization of the Chinese pharmaceutical market since the Reform and Opening-up, medical expenses had increased significantly. According to the 2018 China Health Statistics Yearbook, drug revenues in general hospitals accounted for 34.21% of medical revenues. To control the increasing cost of medicines, from October 1997 to May 2012, Chinese pharmaceutical prices underwent 30 times adjustments of the highest retail

The weibull distribution plays a crucial role in reliability theory and life-testing experiments. Weibull mixtures are widely used to model lifetime and failure time data, since they exhibit a wide range of shapes for the failure rate function. In this paper, the failure data of crank rod system was analyzed by using mixture weibull distribution model. The distribution parameters of the mixture weibull distribution model were estimated by using maximum likelihood estimation and drawing method. The comparison of fitting degree of failure location between standard weibull distribution model and mixture weibull model was given. Results show that the fitting degree of the failure data in the mixture weibull distribution model is higher than that of the simple weibull distribution model, and it can more accurately described the failure distribution curve of the system in life cycle.