In the case of four of the six programs, a new version was launched immediately after the self-timed expiration date of the preceding program.
For current smokers, the current smoking episode was considered to have begun at the midpoint between the most recent date at which a woman reported having started to smoke and the date of the preceding visit.
The exception was for participants living in England whose date of recruitment preceded 1 April 1997 (earliest date of hospital admissions data for England) for whom the beginning of follow-up was set to 1 April 1997.
On 12 occasions, date of death preceded other general practice observation data, and in these circumstances we assumed that the woman was still alive and removed the inconsistent date of death.
The reason for some patients not receiving POCRT were advanced age (>70 years), significant contraindicating co-morbidity or that their date of treatment preceded the published evidence supporting POCRT.
Assuming that the case data were entered in chronological order, we standardized dates by using, as a cue, the dates of the preceding and following AES cases.
This approach is called "phylogenetic bracketing" [ 97], which obtains not only minimum, but also maximum constraints on the timing of a branching event using the dates of the preceding and subsequent branching episodes [ 98, 99].
Murdoch's economics is out of date, preceding both the lessons we have learned about free markets from the financial crash and the latest thinking about what is good and bad about the market mechanism.
Analyses were also conducted on all dates to ensure that dates were entered in a way that made sense chronologically (e.g. ensuring that dates of birth preceded dates of training and ensuring that dates of training at lower levels preceded dates of training at more advanced levels).
TTS was evaluated from the date of surgery immediately preceding vaccination to the date of death or last contact (if still living).
