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- Herttua, Kimmo, et al.
(författare)
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Influence of affordability of alcohol on educational disparities in alcohol-related mortality in Finland and Sweden : a time series analysis
- 2017
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Ingår i: Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. - : BMJ. - 0143-005X .- 1470-2738. ; 71:12, s. 1168-1176
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Prices of alcohol and income tend to influence how much people buy and consume alcohol. Price and income may be combined into one measure, affordability of alcohol. Research on the association between affordability of alcohol and alcohol-related harm is scarce. Furthermore, no research exists on how this association varies across different subpopulations. We estimated the effects of affordability of alcohol on alcohol-related mortality according to gender and education in Finland and Sweden.Methods: Vector-autoregressive time series modelling was applied to the quarter-annual aggregations of alcohol-related deaths and affordability of alcohol in Finland in 1988–2007 and in Sweden in 1991–2008. Alcohol-related mortality was defined using information on both underlying and contributory causes of death. We calculated affordability of alcohol index using information on personal taxable income and prices of various types of alcohol.Results: Among Finnish men with secondary education,an increase of 1% in the affordability of total alcohol was associated with an increase of 0.028% (95% CI 0.004 to 0.053) in alcohol-related mortality. Similar associations were also found for affordability for various types of alcohol and for beer only in the lowest education group. We found few other significant positive associations for other subpopulations in Finland or Sweden. However, reverse associations were found among secondary-educated Swedish women.Conclusions: Overall, the associations between affordability of alcohol and alcohol-related mortality were relatively weak. Increased affordability of total alcoholic beverages was associated with higher rates of alcohol-related mortality only among Finnish men with secondary education.
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| 2. |
- Herttua, Kimmo, et al.
(författare)
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Poor Adherence to Statin and Antihypertensive Therapies as Risk Factors for Fatal Stroke
- 2016
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Ingår i: Journal of the American College of Cardiology. - : Elsevier BV. - 0735-1097 .- 1558-3597. ; 67:13, s. 1507-1515
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- BACKGROUND Poor adherence to medication regimens is common, potentially contributing to the occurrence of related disease. OBJECTIVES The authors sought to assess the risk of fatal stroke associated with nonadherence to statin and/ or antihypertensive therapy. METHODS We conducted a population-based study using electronic medical and prescription records from Finnish national registers in 1995 to 2007. Of the 58,266 hypercholesterolemia patients age 30+ years without pre-existing stroke or cardiovascular disease, 532 patients died of stroke (cases), and 57,734 remained free of incident stroke (controls) during the mean follow-up of 5.5 years. We captured year-by-year adherence to statin and antihypertensive therapy in both study groups and estimated the excess risk of stroke death associated with nonadherence. RESULTS In all hypercholesterolemia patients, the adjusted odds ratio for stroke death for nonadherent compared with adherent statin users was 1.35 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.04 to 1.74) 4 years before and 2.04 (95% CI: 1.72 to 2.43) at the year of stroke death or the end of the follow-up. In hypercholesterolemia patients with hypertension, relative to those who adhered to statins and antihypertensive therapy, the odds ratio at the year of stroke death was 7.43 (95% CI: 5.22 to 10.59) for those nonadherent both to statin and antihypertensive therapy, 1.82 (95% CI: 1.43 to 2.33) for those non-adherent to statin but adherent to antihypertensive therapy, and 1.30 (95% CI: 0.53 to 3.20) for those adherent to statin, but nonadherent to antihypertensive, therapy. CONCLUSIONS Individuals with hypercholesterolemia and hypertension who fail to take their prescribed statin and antihypertensive medication experience a substantially increased risk of fatal stroke. The risk is lower if the patient is adherent to either one of these therapies.
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