I research three topics in adult morbidity in the United States, focusing on two increasingly prevalent chronic diseases, diabetes and dementia. In the first essay, I investigate changes in age-specific diabetes prevalence across cohorts born in the 20th century and use the cross-cohort comparisons to generate model age patterns of diabetes prevalence and incidence. I show that most of the incr...

Social science research finds that the only group to have experienced real economic gains over the past four decades is the top 20 percent of the income distribution. This finding, along with greater awareness of growing inequality, has renewed interest in mobility research that identifies how individuals and their progeny move into and out of upper versus lower income categories. In this study...

Female circumcision is widespread in Egypt. Research suggests that the practice persists because of a belief that circumcision will moderate female sexuality, that it will assure a girl's marriagability, and that it is sanctioned by Islam. Using data from a nationally representative survey of adolescents, this paper investigates the prevalence and social correlates of circumcision among girls a...

The half-cycle correction is often used in discrete Markov models to estimate state membership. This article shows that the correction, in addition to being unintuitive, actually produces the wrong results in many circumstances. These include quality-adjusted life year (QALY) weights and unit costs that differ by cycle. The half-cycle correction is also incompatible with discounting of the obta...

Policies and thresholds vary for placing children into out-of-home care (OHC) at different ages. Evidence is lacking that quantifies the risk of entering OHC by age, and how this varies over time and between countries. We determined the age-specific cumulative incidence of ever entering OHC during childhood in Denmark and in eight local authorities in England. We used administrative data for an...

Using life table measures, we compare educational differentials in all-cause mortality at ages 40 to 70 in Bulgaria to those in Finland and the United States. Specifically, we assess whether the relationship between education and mortality is modified by marital status. Although high education and being married are associated with lower mortality in all three countries, absolute educational dif...

background : multiple sclerosis (ms) is a chronic and progressive disease of the central nervous system with debilitating symptoms and complications. therefore, education and appropriate interventions, including self-care education, are necessary to increase the quality of life in these patients. the purpose of this study was to determine the influence of self-care education on quality of life ...

We examined whether the selection mechanisms committed to the suppression of ignored stimuli can be modified by experience to produce a sustained, rather than transient, change in behavior. Subjects repeatedly ignored the shape of stimuli, while attending to their color. On subsequent attention to shape, there was a robust and sustained decrement in performance that was selective to when shape ...

The life table has been used to study mortality and survival in a population and also the pattern of course of various chronic medical illnesses. In this study, the life table has been applied to a cohort of well defined Schizophrenic patients undergoing a long term followup. The probability of occurence of relapses, time of maximum risk for occurence of relapses are estimated using the life ta...

Hierarchical models are characterized by having N living states connected by N - 1 rates of transfer. Demographic measures for such models can be calculated directly from counts of the number of persons in each state at two nearby points in time. Exploiting the ability of population stocks to determine the flows in hierarchical models expands the range of demographic analysis. The value of such...