Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Dialysis Treatment

It is a long concern academically and politically that Taiwan has high prevalence rate and incidence rate for End-stage renal diseases (ESRD). The first aim of this project is to estimate the association between Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and the incidence of ESRD. Using the NHRI dataset, we are going to use the diabetes patients in 1996-2006 as our base sample. This sample is then merged with the utilization of TCM and dialysis treatment. By using this constructed dataset, we can then analyze the association between TCM and incidence of ESRD for diabetes patients. However, the characteristics of patients using TCM may be totally different with those not using TCM. In order to solve the sample selection problem in our estimation, we are going to use Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method to find two groups of patients with similar patient characteristics. Using PSM, we then can compare the incidence rate of ESRD for diabetes patients with and without using TCM. The second aim of this project is to investigate the association of TCM and ESRD further. We are going to investigate whether an ESRD patient can be better off or worse off in his health outcome if this ESRD patient is also treated by TCM. In addition, we are going to analyze the total medical expense for an ESRD patient if this patient is involved with a regular TCM as well. The health outcome is measured by a patient’s mortality. The total medical expense is calculated from all medical expense from all of this medical treatment from 1996-2006. The sample selection problem is solved by PSM method as well.

Project ID:PF9807-2423
External Project ID:NSC98-2410-H182-012-MY2