1.Active Life Expectancy for People over 65 Years Old in a Local City in the Northern Part of Tohoku District
Hisao FUKUDA ; Kazuyuki KIDA ; Kumiko SAITO ; Shigeki ASAHI ; Reizo MITA ; Yoshiki TAKUSARI
Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine 2001;6(3):192-196
Life expectancy does not necessarily match quality of life (QOL). A cohort study involving a population of 10,107 in a certain city of Japan was conducted to evaluate active life expectancy (ALE), which has a direct relationship with QOL. The ALE that took functional recovery rates into account was 17.20 and 19.08 years for males and females respectively, at the age of 65. These values increased by 2.98 and 3.87 years for men and women, respectively, compared with when functional recovery rates were not considered. ALE may serve as an indicator for the objective evaluation of various public health services provided by local governments.
Life Expectancy
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seconds
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Cities
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Active brand of pseudoephedrine-triprolidine
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Old episode
2.Measures to Cope with Left Dispensed Drugs and Its Effect.
Yuriko EBIHARA ; Kumiko FUKUDA ; Nobuko MORI ; Yasushi SAKURAI ; Kenichi HORIKOSHI ; Osamu TOMISHIMA ; Kazuko OKUSHI
Journal of the Japanese Association of Rural Medicine 1998;46(5):820-824
Patient compliance with presciibed drug regimens may be improved by finding out incom-pliant patients and exhorting them to take their medicines, but it's not an easy task. We telephoned those who had not shown up at the pharmacy within 7 days after the preparation of their drugs to come and receive the dispensed drugs. When the dispensed drugs had to be disposed of after a long misplacement, we prepared a “patient compliance report” to inform the attending physicians about noncompliance by attaching it to the patient's visit history. Further, of when they visited the hospital again we gave guidance about drug compliance at the window to those whose dispensed drugs had been disposed.
We contacted 63 patients by telephone during the 3-month period from January to March 1995 of the patients who left their drugs at the pharmacy, and found 30.6% of them had some compliance problems. Telephone calls were effective for reducing the proportion of the patients whose dispensed drugs were disposed of to 0.03% from 0.11%, the percentage worked our during the 5-month period from August to December 1994 during which no telephone call was made. We reported 19 drug disposal cases to the physicians by means of the “patient compliance report”. All the physicians appreciated it as they were brought to a realizatopn of the drug compliance rate of their patients.
As there were some patients who did not know that their drugs were prescribed, we considered how to cope with the left dispensed drugs would not be a question of the pharmacy alone. It should be handled as a problem of the whole hospital from the stage ofconsultation to payment.
3.Endoscopic treatment or balloon-occluded retrograde transvenous obliteration is safe for patients with esophageal/gastric varices in Child-Pugh class C end-stage liver cirrhosis
Keiji YOKOYAMA ; Ryo YAMAUCHI ; Kumiko SHIBATA ; Hiromi FUKUDA ; Hideo KUNIMOTO ; Kazuhide TAKATA ; Takashi TANAKA ; Shinjiro INOMATA ; Daisuke MORIHARA ; Yasuaki TAKEYAMA ; Satoshi SHAKADO ; Shotaro SAKISAKA
Clinical and Molecular Hepatology 2019;25(2):183-189
BACKGROUND/AIMS: There is a controversy about the availability of invasive treatment for esophageal/gastric varices in patients with Child-Pugh class C (CP-C) end-stage liver cirrhosis (LC). We have evaluated the validity of invasive treatment with CP-C end-stage LC patients. METHODS: The study enrolled 51 patients with CP-C end-stage LC who had undergone invasive treatment. The treatment modalities included endoscopic variceal ligation in 22 patients, endoscopic injection sclerotherapy in 17 patients, and balloon-occluded retrograde transvenous obliteration (BRTO) in 12 patients. We have investigated the overall survival (OS) rates and risk factors that contributed to death within one year after treatment. RESULTS: The OS rate in all patients at one, three, and five years was 72.6%, 30.2%, and 15.1%, respectively. The OS rate in patients who received endoscopic treatment and the BRTO group at one, three, and five years was 67.6%, 28.2% and 14.1% and 90.0%, 36.0% and 18.0%, respectively. The average of Child-Pugh scores (CPS) from before treatment to one month after variceal treatment significantly improved from 10.53 to 10.02 (P=0.003). Three significant factors that contributed to death within one year after treatment included the presence of bleeding varices, high CPS (≥11), and high serum total bilirubin levels (≥4.0 mg/dL). CONCLUSIONS: The study demonstrated that patients with a CPS of up to 10 and less than 4.0 mg/dL of serum total bilirubin levels may not have a negative impact on prognosis after invasive treatment for esophageal/gastric varices despite their CP-C end-stage LC.
Balloon Occlusion
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Bilirubin
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Endoscopy
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Esophageal and Gastric Varices
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Hemorrhage
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Humans
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Hypertension, Portal
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Ligation
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Liver Cirrhosis
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Liver
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Prognosis
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Risk Factors
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Sclerotherapy
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Varicose Veins