The background for this thesis is lack of knowledge that covers the broader perspective of development, implementation, and evaluation of continuity of care-solutions for persons with diverse and complex needs in hospitals and across health services. The aim was therefore to investigate implications for hospital practices related to realizing continuity of care for patients with long-term complex ...

Background: Depression is a common mental disorder and a major contributor to the overall global burden of disease. Healthcare systems struggle to provide effective and acceptable treatment to meet the needs of the growing number of patients suffering from depression. Although there are some known, effective medical treatments for depression, far from all of those affected receive such treatments, ...

Insulin‐like growth factor‐I (IGF‐I) regulates cell proliferation and apoptosis, and is thought to play a role in tumour development. Previous prospective studies have shown that higher circulating concentrations of IGF‐I are associated with a higher risk of cancers at specific sites, including breast and prostate. No prospective study has examined the association between circulating IGF‐I concentrations ...

<i>Background</i>: BMI is known to be strongly associated with all-cause mortality, but few studies have been large enough to reliably examine associations between BMI and a comprehensive range of cause-specific mortality outcomes.<p> <p><i>Methods</i>: In this population-based cohort study, we used UK primary care data from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) linked to national ...

<i>Objective</i>: The existing eligible randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were critically appraised for the effectiveness and safety of Chinese herbal medicine Dengzhan Shenmai for ischemic stroke.<p> <p><i>Design</i>: Systematic review and meta-analysis (CRD42016042914, http://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO). Methods: Six electronic databases were searched from inception to May 2016. Risk ratio ...

Culture-independent molecular techniques and advances in next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies make large-scale epidemiological studies on microbiota feasible. A challenge using NGS is to obtain high reproducibility and repeatability, which is mostly attained through robust amplification. We aimed to assess the reproducibility of saliva microbiota by comparing triplicate samples. The ...

The theory of breast cancer as a <i>child deficiency disease</i> is an <i>inversion of the current paradigm</i>, which considers fullterm pregnancies to be a protective factor and uses nulliparous women as the reference group. Instead, the theory of breast cancer as a child deficiency disease says that women with the highest parity (about 20, which is the limit of human fertility) are those with ...

The thesis is based upon data from two cross-sectional population-based surveys, the SAMINOR 1 Survey (2003-2004) and the SAMINOR 2 Clinical Survey (2012-2014). The prevalence of pre-diabetes and diabetes mellitus among Sami and non-Sami inhabitants of the 24 municipalities from North- and Mid-Norway was estimated in the SAMINOR 1 Survey. No statistically significant difference in the prevalence of ...

Most sequence variants identified hitherto in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of atrial fibrillation are common, non-coding variants associated with risk through unknown mechanisms. We performed a meta-analysis of GWAS of atrial fibrillation among 29,502 cases and 767,760 controls from Iceland and the UK Biobank with follow-up in samples from Norway and the US, focusing on low-frequency coding ...

<i>Aim</i>: To evaluate the availability and affordability of medicines used to treat of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) in several regions of the Russian Federation with different climatic, geographic, economic and demographic characteristics.<p> <p><i>Material and methods</i>: The study was conducted in 6 regional capitals, chosen to differ in geographically, economically, and demographically. ...