Studies with stratified cluster designs, called complex surveys, have increased in popularity in medical research recently. With the passing of the Affordable Care Act, more information about effectiveness of treatment, cost of treatment, and patient satisfaction may be gleaned from these large complex surveys. We introduce three separate methodological approaches that are useful in complex surveys.

In this paper, I examine how the federal Department of Western Economic Diversification has adapted and survived despite considerable odds. By employing variations of three survival strategies, the Department has been responsive to its stakeholders yet achieved autonomy. Furthermore, the impact of these results has been affected by a number of institutional arrangements. Western Economic Diversification Canada has survived by leveraging responsive competence and organizational autonomy with actors in the political process, including politicians, civil society, and other government officials. It has been aided by its comparative advantage as an advocate for western Canada and by its small size.

In the master's work the necessity for the company's financial and non-financial evaluation is described basing on Lithuanian and foreign authors' works. The work presents the completive markets, competitive environment analysis and financial indexes of evaluation of the company's activity and describes the ways and methods of their analysis and models for establishment of developmental and forecast possibilities. Basing on the model worked out Join Stock Company "Liumenas" competitive environment was evaluated and the sales, costs, employees composition and structure analysis was carried out, financial indexes of the company's activity, bankruptcy risk, forecasted tendencies of the changes in sales were evaluated and the developmental possibilities were given. The author's hypothesis that Join Stock Company "Liumenas" is able to hold out in the competitive market and to develop its activity was confirmed.

Background: Young BRCA mutation carries with a history of breast cancer often inquire about the impact of pregnancy upon their risks of cancer recurrence and survival. Methods: We identified 128 BRCA carriers who were diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant or who became pregnant after breast cancer diagnosis. Women were matched to 269 controls. Women were followed from the date of breast cancer diagnosis until the date of death. The Kaplan-Meier method and a left-truncated Cox proportional hazard model were used to estimate 15-year survival rates. Results: The adjusted hazard ratio associated with 15-year survival for women diagnosed with breast cancer who were or became pregnant after breast cancer diagnosis, compared to women who did not become pregnant was 0.76 (95% CI 0.31 to 1.91 p = 0.56). Conclusion: Pregnancy concurrent with or after a diagnosis of breast cancer does not appear to adversely affect survival among BRCA1/2 mutation carriers.

Virtually all multicellular organisms rely on a highly conserved innate immune system for defense against foreign microorganisms. Innate immunity consists primarily of a humeral response that culminates in the expression of antimicrobial peptides. In contrast to adaptive immunity seen in high order organisms, the innate immune response is not specific to the invader. In aging organisms, some of the most dramatic transcriptional changes take place within the innate immune system. In aging mammals, innate immune reorganization coincides with declining immune function, which often manifests itself as chronic inflammation. Similar to this state of chronic inflammation in mammals, Drosophila exhibit a marked upregulation of many innate immunity related genes. However, it remains unclear if this upregulation results in a similar decrease in immune function to that seen in mammals. If Drosophila is to be considered as a model organism in which to study the relationship between immunity and aging, it must first be determined whether it too undergoes declining immune function with age. By examining the response to quantifiable injections of bacteria, we were able to deduce that adult Drosophila do indeed undergo immune senescence. Elderly wildtype flies infected with various doses of bacteria showed a decreased ability to survive infection. Moreover, because the ability to clear the infection remains intact despite decreased survival following infection, it is believed that a bacterially produced factor is responsible for immune senescence in adult Drosophila. / Thesis (Master, Biology) -- Queen's University, 2007-10-02 09:37:18.314

Background: Young BRCA mutation carries with a history of breast cancer often inquire about the impact of pregnancy upon their risks of cancer recurrence and survival. Methods: We identified 128 BRCA carriers who were diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant or who became pregnant after breast cancer diagnosis. Women were matched to 269 controls. Women were followed from the date of breast cancer diagnosis until the date of death. The Kaplan-Meier method and a left-truncated Cox proportional hazard model were used to estimate 15-year survival rates. Results: The adjusted hazard ratio associated with 15-year survival for women diagnosed with breast cancer who were or became pregnant after breast cancer diagnosis, compared to women who did not become pregnant was 0.76 (95% CI 0.31 to 1.91 p = 0.56). Conclusion: Pregnancy concurrent with or after a diagnosis of breast cancer does not appear to adversely affect survival among BRCA1/2 mutation carriers.

This thesis demonstrates the possible cutoff sample size point that balances goodness of es-timation and study expenditure by a practical cancer case. As it is crucial to determine the sample size in designing an experiment, researchers attempt to find the suitable sample size that achieves desired power and budget efficiency at the same time. The thesis shows how simulation can be used for sample size and precision calculations with survival data. The pre-sentation concentrates on the simulation involved in carrying out the estimates and precision calculations. The Kaplan-Meier estimator and the Cox regression coefficient are chosen as point estimators, and the precision measurements focus on the mean square error and the stan-dard error.

Using data from Hedge Fund Research, Inc. (HFR), this study adapts and expands on existing methods in survival analysis in an attempt to investigate whether hedge funds mortality can be predicted on the basis of certain hedge funds characteristics. The main idea is to determine the characteristics which contribute the most to the survival and failure probabilities of hedge funds and interpret them. We establish hazard models with time-independent covariates, as well as time-varying covariates to interpret the selected hedge funds characteristics. Our results show that size, age, performance, strategy, annual audit, fund offshore and fund denomination are the characteristics that best explain hedge fund failure. We find that 1% increase in performance decreases the hazard by 3.3%, the small size and the less than 5 years old hedge funds are the most likely to die and the event-driven strategy is the best to use as compare to others. The risk of death is 0.668 times lower for funds who indicated that an annual audit is performed as compared to the funds who did not indicated that an annual audit is performed. The risk of death for the offshore hedge funds is 1.059 times higher than the non-offshore hedge funds.

Abstract Previous studies have shown that wild smolt have 2.5-4.5 times higher survival rate than smolt grown in culture and that starved reared smolt behave more like wild born smolt. The purpose of this project was to study whether there are differences in migration patterns and survival during migration to the coast between wild and reared smolt and between different types of reared smolt. In 2009, 25 smolts in three different groups were tagged with acoustic transmitters: Wild Born, conventionally reared 2-year and 1 –year old smolt. For the 2010 trial there was also added a group of reared 2 –year old smolt that were starved before release. Receivers were placed in the river and in a line outside the estuary. The receivers recorded when the tagged fish passed and which fish it was. Based on information from the receivers the survival rate and migration speed could be calculated for each group and be compared to the smolts amount of body fat. In this study the condition factor (weight/length3 *100000) was used as an indicator of the smolts body fat levels. The study was conducted in river Dalälven. The results provide some indications that the wild born smolt in accordance with previous studies had a slightly higher (not significant) survival rate than the other groups. No major signs of differences in survival were seen between the groups of the conventionally reared and the starved reared smolt. The annual smolt seemed to have a slightly higher survival rate than these two groups. Unlike the results in earlier studies the wild born smolt did not migrate significantly faster than any of the other groups. No significant difference was observed between the conventionally reared and the starved smolt. The group that migrated fastest was the 1 –year old smolt. It was the group of 1 –year old smolt that was most similar to the wild born smolt in regard to the condition factor. But the wild born smolt were still considerably leaner. There was a significant difference in the condition factor between the starved smolt and those grown conventionally. But the difference was probably too small to show any differences in migration behavior when they still were much larger than the wild born smolt. There also tended to be a negative correlation between low condition factor and higher survival. In this study the starved smolt behaved more like the conventionally reared than the wild hatched. They were not starved for a sufficient amount of time to reach as low levels of body fat as the wild hatched smolt. It would require studies in which smolt were starved for longer period to evaluate whether the condition factor is crucial for if reared smolt in river Dalälven possibly can behave as wild smolt.

No description available.