Coronary artery calcium screening: current status and recommendations from the European Society of Cardiac Radiology and North American Society for Cardiovascular Imaging

Current guidelines and literature on screening for coronary artery calcium for cardiac risk assessment are reviewed for both general and special populations. It is shown that for both general and special populations a zero score excludes most clinically relevant coronary artery disease. The importance of standardization of coronary artery calcium measurements by multi-detector CT is discussed

May Measurement Month 2018: a pragmatic global screening campaign to raise awareness of blood pressure by the International Society of Hypertension

Aims Raised blood pressure (BP) is the biggest contributor to mortality and disease burden worldwide and fewer than half of those with hypertension are aware of it. May Measurement Month (MMM) is a global campaign set up in 2017, to raise awareness of high BP and as a pragmatic solution to a lack of formal screening worldwide. The 2018 campaign was expanded, aiming to include more participants and countries. Methods and results Eighty-nine countries participated in MMM 2018. Volunteers (≥18 years) were recruited through opportunistic sampling at a variety of screening sites. Each participant had three BP measurements and completed a questionnaire on demographic, lifestyle, and environmental factors. Hypertension was defined as a systolic BP ≥140 mmHg or diastolic BP ≥90 mmHg, or taking antihypertensive medication. In total, 74.9% of screenees provided three BP readings. Multiple imputation using chained equations was used to impute missing readings. 1 504 963 individuals (mean age 45.3 years; 52.4% female) were screened. After multiple imputation, 502 079 (33.4%) individuals had hypertension, of whom 59.5% were aware of their diagnosis and 55.3% were taking antihypertensive medication. Of those on medication, 60.0% were controlled and of all hypertensives, 33.2% were controlled. We detected 224 285 individuals with untreated hypertension and 111 214 individuals with inadequately treated (systolic BP ≥ 140 mmHg or diastolic BP ≥ 90 mmHg) hypertension. Conclusion May Measurement Month expanded significantly compared with 2017, including more participants in more countries. The campaign identified over 335 000 adults with untreated or inadequately treated hypertension. In the absence of systematic screening programmes, MMM was effective at raising awareness at least among these individuals at risk

Portfolio Performance Measurement: Theory and Applications

Any admissible portfolio performance measure should satisfy four minimal conditions: it assigns zero performance to each reference portfolio and it is linear, continuous, and nontrivial. Such an admissible measure exists if and only if the securities market obeys the law of one price. A positive admissible measure exists if and only if there is no arbitrage. This article characterizes the (infinite) set of admissible performance measures. It is shown that performance evaluation is generally quite arbitrary. A mutual fund data set is also used to demonstrate how the measurement method developed here can be applied.Link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Portfolio Performance Measurement: Theory and Applications

Any admissible portfolio performance measure should satisfy four minimal conditions: it assigns zero performance to each reference portfolio and it is linear, continuous and nontribial. Such an admissible measure exists if and only if the securities market obeys the law of one price. A positive admissible measure exists if and only if there is not arbitrage. This paper characterizes the (infinite) set of admissible performance measures. It is shown that performance evaluation is generally quite arbitrary. A mutual fund data set is also used to demonstrate how the measurement method developed here can be applied.

On the Robustness of Size and Book-to-Market in Cross-Sectional Regressions.

The authors use a robust regression estimator to analyze the risk premia on size and book-to-market. They find that the risk premium on size that was estimated by Eugene F. Fama and Kenneth R. French (1992) completely disappears when the 1 percent most extreme observations are trimmed each month. The authors also show that the negative average of the monthly size coefficients reported by Fama and French can be entirely explained by the sixteen months with the most extreme coefficients. They argue that further investigation of these results could lead to an understanding of the economic forces underlying the size effect, and may also yield important insights into how firms grow. Copyright 1997 by American Finance Association.