Information on cause of death among adults in sub-Saharan Africa is essentially nonexistent. Published sources provide statistics on both cause-specific and overall rates of mortality, but closer examination reveals that these data consist mostly of extrapolations and outright guesses. In the absence of accurate and comprehensive registries of vital events for the majority of the region's inhab...

BACKGROUND Previous research on clinical and high-risk samples suggests that signs of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be detected between 1 and 2 years of age. We investigated signs of ASD at 18 months in a population-based sample and the association with later ASD diagnosis. METHODS The study sample includes 52,026 children born 2003 through 2008 and is a subset of children that participa...

BACKGROUND The clinical course and epidemiology of major depressive episodes (MDEs) may be influenced by reciprocal interactions between an individual and the social environment. Epidemiological data concerning these interactions may assist with anticipating the clinical needs of depressed patients. METHODS The data source for this study was a Canadian longitudinal study, the National Populat...

INTRODUCTION Undergraduate education in medical schools plays an important role in promoting patient safety. Medical students from different backgrounds may have different perceptions and attitudes toward issues concerning safety. This study aimed to investigate whether patient safety cultures differed between students from two Asian countries, and if they did, to find out how they differed. Th...

OBJECTIVES This longitudinal study examined the prevalence and correlates of energy drink use among college students, and investigated its possible prospective associations with subsequent drug use, including nonmedical prescription drug use. METHODS Participants were 1,060 undergraduates from a large, public university who completed three annual interviews, beginning in their first year of c...

This study is aiming to evaluate the association between television viewing during childhood and long-term adolescent neuropsychological outcomes and the potential explanatory pathways. This is a longitudinal study based on 278 children participating in the INMA birth cohort (1998) in Menorca Island, Spain. The exposure is parent-reported duration of child television viewing (hours per week) at...

The association between visit-to-visit variability of blood pressure (BP) and cognitive decline over time remains incompletely understood in a general population of older adults. We assessed the hypothesis that higher visit-to-visit variability in BP, but not mean BP, would be associated with faster decline in cognitive function among community-dwelling older adults. This prospective cohort stu...

OBJECTIVE Longitudinal studies on headaches often focus on the identification of risk factors for headache occurrence or "chronification". This study in particular examines psychological variables as potential predictors of headache remission in children and adolescents. METHODS Data on biological, social, and psychological variables were gathered by questionnaire as part of a large populatio...

Background Tobacco smoking harms health, so why do people smoke and fail to quit? An explanation originating in behavioural economics suggests a role for time-discounting, which describes how the value of a reward, such as better health, decreases with delay to its receipt. A large number of studies test the relationship of time-discounting with tobacco outcomes but the temporal pattern of this...

BACKGROUND Despite the importance of socioeconomic position for survival, total wealth, which is a measure of accumulation of assets over the life course, has been underinvestigated as a predictor of mortality. We investigated the association between total wealth and mortality at older ages. METHODS We estimated Cox proportional hazards models using a sample of 10,305 community-dwelling indiv...