Publications

Introduction: A Task Force was commissioned jointly by the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (EAACI) and the Respiratory Effectiveness Group (REG) to develop a quality assessment tool for real-life observational research to identify high-quality real-life asthma studies that could be considered within future guideline development. Methods: The resulting REal Life EVidence AssessmeNt Tool (RELEVANT) was achieved through an ...

EFFECT (EFFectiveness of Endometrial Cancer Treatment): A study on the quality and effectiveness of the care for endometrial cancer in Belgium. With 78.920 newly diagnosed cases in 2018, corpus uteri cancer (i.e. uterine cancer, cervix uteri excluded) is the fourth most common cancer in European women after breast, colorectal and lung cancer. Furthermore, it is also the most common gynecologic cancer, preceding ovarian and cervical cancer ...

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the main cause of death and disability in Europe and 10% of the total health care costs in the European Union is due to CVD. This thesis provides original research on a cardiovascular prevention programme focused on medical risk factors and risk behaviours such as an unhealthy diet, low levels of physical activity, and smoking in a highly educated sample. The behavioural interventions, namely a website and ...

In order to ascertain which school characteristics can explain the differences in effectiveness between schools, important methodological choices have to be made in school effectiveness research. One of these choices relates to the criterion or criteria the researcher wishes to use to compare schools. Should, for example, a school be deemed effective if it achieves high performances in mathematics, or in mother tongue or in both? In order to ...

On average, 2,500 young people (15-24 years) get infected with HIV every day; 80% of which live in sub-Saharan Africa. Since no cure or vaccine is available, reducing sexual risk behaviour in this group is crucial in tackling the epidemic. The general objective of this doctoral study was to improve the effectiveness of HIV prevention interventions for young people in sub-Saharan Africa. First, we assessed the overall effectiveness of such ...

AimTo evaluate the real-world comparative effectiveness and the cost-effectiveness, from a UK National Health Service perspective, of natalizumab versus fingolimod in patients with rapidly evolving severe relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RES-RRMS).MethodsReal-world data from the MSBase Registry were obtained for patients with RES-RRMS who were previously either naive to disease-modifying therapies or had been treated with interferon-based ...

This practice based research on effectiveness and efficiency of learning media design is meant to provide an answer to the professional bachelor programs nursing of three affiliated university colleges of the Catholic University of Leuven and one associate degree program for the optimization of their blended learning approach for the practical skills component of the programs. In particular we want to find the most optimal media design for ...

Heat transfer is a physical process in which energy is exchanged. It occurs in numerous applications, such as production of electricity, building climatisation, food preparation,... Since energy consumption has increased tremendously in the last decades and this trend will continue, the concept of energy efficiency has become omnipresent. In electronics miniaturization has become a trend. Desktops, laptops, dvd-players, mp3-players, ...

The promotion of democracy has become a key objective of the European Union (EU) in sub-Saharan Africa. One of the ways in which this objective is pursued is by reacting to violations of democratic principles using negative measures: naming and shaming strategies or economic/diplomatic sanctions. Yet the application of negative measures has been criticised as being characterised by „double standards‟, meaning that similar violations of ...