Does new technology increase or decrease health care costs?
A method has been devised that allows the impact of changes in medical technology on formal health care costs to be investigated for individual illnesses. In the treatment of peptic ulceration, the current technology, H. pylori eradication, has lower treatment costs than all previous technologies. The evidence from previous studies and this study is insufficient to support the assertion that new technology in general leads either to an increase or to a decrease in health care costs.
These results demonstrate a stepwise cooperation between IL-13 and LTD(4). IL-13 upregulates CysLT(1) expression and consequently the response to cysLTs This results in an increased release of eotaxin-3 by epithelial cells which at its turn increases the recruitment of leukocytes and their biosynthesis of cysLTs. This positive amplification loop involving epithelial cells and leukocytes could be implicated in the recruitment of eosinophils observed in asthmatics.