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Background The impact of stroke is devastating the life of patients, families, and even the communities. The cost of treatment; however, has the tendency of increasing nowadays, which has brought a heavy burden to patients and their families. Our study aims to collect the data of the hospital cost among stroke patients in Chinese island populations over the past decade and provide the scientific improvement for stroke. Methods We retrospectively collected the basic information and hospital costs of the stroke patients in Dalian Changhai Hospital from 2003 to 2013 using the Information Registration System of Inpatient. Results The total cumulative hospital admissions for stroke in Dalian Changhai Hospital were 1367 and showed a rising tendency from 2003 to 2013. Our results illustrated that the annual cumulative hospital costs of stroke inpatients increased rapidly in the past 11 years (the average rise was 37.71% per year), and the mean hospital cost per admission was 1.66% higher than that before, when the mean length of hospital days showed a downward tendency. Medication cost was found to be the largest part in the overall hospital cost (as a high percentage of 73.94%); however, traditional Chinese medicine only occupied quite a small proportion in the medicines. Conclusions The hospital cost for stroke in Dalian Changhai County has brought an increasingly heavy economic burden to the local government and residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fourteen years of regulated air pollutants concentrations were analyzed in order to characterize the benefits of Brazil's emission control policies on air quality conditions and to evaluate the temporal patterns between 1996 and 2009 over the Metropolitan Area of São Paulo (MASP). MASP includes one of the largest cities in the world (São Paulo) and its light-duty vehicular fleet has a very important characteristic in that it uses, on a large scale, fuels such as ethanol derived from sugar cane and compressed natural gas. Nowadays, ethanol makes up more than 50% of the fuel used in Brazil. The frequent episodes with high ozone and PM 10 concentration values in the MASP are mostly associated with vehicular emissions – primary emission of particles and gases enrolled in ozone photochemical production and formation of secondary fine particles. Although the fleet has increased at a substantial rate, annual mean values show a diminishing tendency for all pollutants except for ozone, which presents no significant tendency. This diminishing tendency in the analyzed period is due to the vehicular emission control program established by the Brazilian Government in 1986, called PROCONVE (Program for the Control of Vehicular Emission). Monthly mean values, as expected, show higher concentrations of all pollutants except for ozone during wintertime. The diurnal cycle of the pollutants in most of the stations shows two peaks, associated with rush hours, except for ozone, whose peak follows the maximum radiation incidence. Secondary (nocturnal) ozone concentration maxima were sometimes verified around three and four LST. Average values for weekdays and weekends showed that the different air quality stations showed different patterns for the pollutants. For ozone the concentrations were higher during the weekend when compared to weekdays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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