Long-term birth cohort studies are essential to understanding the life course and childhood predictors of allergy and the complex interplay between genes and the environment (including lifestyle and socioeconomic determinants). Over 100 cohorts focusing on asthma and allergy have been initiated in the world over the past 30 years. Since 2004, several research initiatives funded under the EU Fra...

Studies on well-being and its possible determinants are rare in the international literature, and almost non-existent in Brazil, particularly among youth. The present study focused on the epidemiology of well-being among adolescents belonging to a birth cohort. Well-being was measured using face-to-face interviews, with a question whose answer was based on a graphic scale of faces. 4,452 adoles...

Social mobility is now a matter of greater political concern in Britain than at any time previously. However, the data available for the determination of mobility trends are less adequate today than two or three decades ago. It is widely believed in political and in media circles that social mobility is in decline. But the evidence so far available from sociological research, focused on interge...

M uch of the original work on vitamin D and asthma incidence focused on birth cohort studies. These studies examined the effect of maternal intake of vitamin D during pregnancy and its impact on asthma/wheeze in the first few years of life [1–3]. In all three of these methodologically wellperformed birth cohort studies, higher maternal intake of vitamin D was associated with a lower incidence o...

Importance Acetaminophen (paracetamol) is used by a large proportion of pregnant women. Research suggests that acetaminophen use in pregnancy is associated with abnormal fetal neurodevelopment. However, it is possible that this association might be confounded by unmeasured behavioral factors linked to acetaminophen use. Objective To examine associations between offspring behavioral problems a...

AIMS We sought to examine the fall in age of first drinking in Ireland and to determine whether there were gender differences. We also aimed to determine whether there was a relationship between the per capita alcohol consumption evident when people entered later adolescence and their age of drinking onset. METHODS Information on age of first drinking was based on retrospective recall of 9832...

BACKGROUND Prevalence of obesity is the result of preceding incidence of newly developed obesity and persistence of obesity. We investigated whether increasing incidence and/or persistence during childhood drove the prevalence of childhood obesity during the emerging epidemic. METHODS Height and weight were measured at ages 7 and 13 years in 192,992 Danish school children born 1930-1969. Tren...

This article examines the impact of war-induced ill early childhood health on educational attainment in early adolescence. Using data on a small panel of children we find that children who were malnourished at baseline had on average attained fewer grades than children of the same year of birth cohort who were healthier at baseline. The effect is particularly salient for the older children who ...

The objectives of this overview are to describe the past and potential contributions of birth cohorts to understanding chronic disease aetiology; advance a justification for the maintenance of birth cohorts from low- and middle-income countries (LMIC); provide an audit of birth cohorts from LMIC; and, finally, offer possible future directions for this sphere of research. While the contribution ...

BACKGROUND The declining incidence of schizophrenia observed in several countries is believed by many to merely reflect methodological problems in the studies performed. We report the first nationwide historical cohort study of changes in the incidence of schizophrenia, in which many of the previous methodological problems were overcome. METHODS We used the Finnish Population Register to iden...