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Background: The Sarcoma Policy Checklist was created by a multidisciplinary expert group to provide policymakers with priority areas to improve care for sarcoma patients.Main Body: This paper draws on this research, by looking more closely at how France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom are addressing each of these priority areas. It aims to highlight key gaps in research, policy and practice, as well as ongoing initiatives that may impact the future care of sarcoma patients in different European countries. A pragmatic review of the published and web-based literature was undertaken. Telephone interviews were conducted in each country with clinical and patient experts to substantiate findings. Research findings were discussed within the expert group and developed into five core policy recommendations. The five identified priority areas were: the development of designated and accredited centres of reference; more professional training; multidisciplinary care; greater incentives for research and innovation; and more rapid access to effective treatments. Most of the countries studied have ongoing initiatives addressing many of these priorities; however, many are in early stages of development, or require additional funding and resources.Conclusion: Gaps in access to quality care are particularly concerning in many of Europe's lower-resourced countries. Equitable access to information, clinical trials, innovative treatments and quality specialist care should be available to all sarcoma patients. Achieving this across Europe will require close collaboration between all stakeholders at both the national and European level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The clinical symptoms of schizophrenia are associated with serious social, quality of life and functioning alterations. Typically, data on health utilities are not available in clinical studies in schizophrenia. This makes the economic evaluation of schizophrenia treatments challenging. The purpose of this article was to provide a mapping function to predict unobserved utility values in patients with schizophrenia from the available clinical and socio-demographic information.Methods: The analysis was performed using data from EuroSC, a 2-year, multi-centre, cohort study conducted in France (N = 288), Germany (N = 618), and the UK (N = 302), totalling 1208 patients. Utility was calculated based on the EQ-5D questionnaire. The relationships between the utility values and the patients' socio-demographic and clinical characteristics (Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale--PANSS, Calgary Depression Scale for Schizophrenia--CDSS, Global Assessment of Functioning--GAF, extra-pyramidal symptoms measured by Barnes Akathisia Scale-BAS, age, sex, country, antipsychotic type) were modelled using a random and a fixed individual effects panel linear model.Results: The analysis demonstrated the prediction ability of the used parameters for estimating utility measures in patients with schizophrenia. Although there are small variations between countries, the same variables appear to be the key predictors. From a clinical perspective, age, gender, psychopathology, and depression were the most important predictors associated with the EQ-5D.Conclusion: This paper proposed a reliable, robust and easy-to-apply mapping method to estimate EQ-5D utilities based on demographic and clinical measures in schizophrenia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Schizophrenia has a variety of clinical profiles, disabilities and outcomes requiring responsive management and the devotion of considerable resources. The primary objective of the European Schizophrenia Cohort (EuroSC) is to relate the types of treatment and methods of care to clinical outcome. Secondary objectives include the assessment of treatment needs in relation to outcome, the calculation of resource consumption associated with different methods of care, and the identification of prognostic factors.Method: EuroSC is a naturalistic follow-up of a cohort of people aged 18 to 64 years, suffering from schizophrenia and in contact with secondary psychiatric services. The study was done in nine European centres, in France (N = 288), Germany (N = 618), and Britain (N = 302). Participants were interviewed at 6-monthly intervals for a total of 2 years. This initial paper describes the methods used and presents clinical and social baseline data.Results: The clinical and socio-demographic differences between patients from the different countries were small. However, patients from Britain were considerably more likely than their continental counterparts to have a history of homelessness, rooflessness or imprisonment, even when social and clinical differences between the samples were controlled.Conclusions: The samples were largely similar in clinical terms. Thus, the social differences between the samples seem likely to be due more to the societal context and may reflect relatively benign situations in the continental locations of our study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clinical trials for the treatment of schizophrenia now often include cognitive assessments in addition to clinical ratings of symptoms. Recently, these trials have included cross-national assessments. It is not clear if translated psychological tests produce consistent results across different languages. This paper presents the results of a study of the comparability of the results of cognitive assessments in different English-speaking countries and a number of countries where tests were translated into other languages. Performance on tests of executive functioning, verbal and visuo-spatial learning and memory, language skills, psychomotor speed, and vigilance was compared across the first episode patients with schizophrenia (n=301) assessed in six different languages (English, French, Finnish, German, Hebrew, and Afrikaans), including two different countries where patients were assessed in English and other languages: Canada (French) and South Africa (Afrikaans). The variance in performance across the sites tested in English was as large as the variance between English and non-English speakers when all tests were considered. Performance differences across English and other languages were found only for executive functions, vigilance, and psychomotor speed, with executive functioning differences nonsignificant when education was considered. No differences were found between English and non-English speakers in Canada. These results suggest that the translation of tests of memory and verbal skills can lead to consistent results across translated versions of the tests. Differences between countries were greater than differences between languages, suggesting the need to consider representativeness of patient samples in terms of local educational attainment. In general, these data support the validity of cross-national neuropsychological assessments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]