Background: This study evaluated early childhood comorbidities of cerebral palsy (CP) in low birth weight (LBW) children and assessed the impact of maternal bio-psychosocial factors on CP risk in preterm infants of varying birth weights (BWs). Methods: Data from 15,181 preterm infants (2009–2013) and 151,810 controls were analyzed using Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research Database. CP prevalence and LBW-associated comorbidities were examined, and odds ratios (ORs) were calculated. Results: This study confirmed increasing prematurity and LBW rates in Taiwan, with LBW infants showing higher CP prevalence. Significant maternal risk factors included age extremes (40 years). LBW infants exhibited higher risks for respiratory, circulatory, nervous system, and psycho-developmental comorbidities compared with controls, with the lowest BW having even higher ORs. Maternal factors such as family income, the number of hospital admissions, and length of hospital stay were remarkably correlated with BW and subsequent complications. Each additional gestational week crucially reduced the risk of complications in premature infants. Conclusions: LBW infants are at a higher risk for CP and various comorbidities, with maternal bio-psychosocial factors playing a critical role. Addressing these factors in prenatal care and interventions is essential to improve outcomes for premature infants.

A new form of aneurysmal dilatation of large vessels is becoming known in patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. We present a case report of a patient with this anomaly and discuss the radiological dilemmas involved in the diagnosis of the disease. This case highlights the need for computed tomography (CT) angiography as the imaging medium of choice.

For testing the equality of two survival functions, the weighted logrank test and the weighted Kaplan–Meier test are the two most widely used methods. Actually, each of these tests has advantages and defects against various alternatives, while we cannot specify in advance the possible types of the survival differences. Hence, how to choose a single test or combine a number of competitive tests for indicating the diversities of two survival functions without suffering a substantial loss in power is an important issue. Instead of directly using a particular test which generally performs well in some situations and poorly in others, we further consider a class of tests indexed by a weighted parameter for testing the equality of two survival functions in this paper. A delete-1 jackknife method is implemented for selecting weights such that the variance of the test is minimized. Some numerical experiments are performed under various alternatives for illustrating the superiority of the proposed method. Finally, the proposed testing procedure is applied to two real-data examples as well.

Testing procedures are considered for identifying the minimum effective dose (MED) in a dose–response study with randomly right-censored survival data, where the MED is defined to be the smallest dose level under study that has survival advantage over the zero dose control. The proposed testing procedures are implemented in a step-down manner together with three different types of weighted Kaplan–Meier statistics. Comparative results of a Monte Carlo error rate and power/bias study for a variety of survival and censoring distributions are then presented and discussed. The application of the proposed procedures is finally illustrated for identifying the MED of the diethylstilbestrol in the treatment of prostate cancer.