BACKGROUND Little is known about reasons that influence parents' decision to participate in studies enrolling healthy children. The aim of this observational study was to verify the reasons that lead pregnant women to give their consent or to refuse participation to a newborn cohort study with a long follow up time. METHODS To prospectively investigate the reasons that lead women to participa...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To examine whether attitude to school is associated with subsequent risk of teenage pregnancy. To test two hypotheses that attitude to school is linked to pregnancy via pathways involving young people having "alternative" expectations or deficits in sexual health knowledge and confidence. DESIGN Analysis of longitudinal data arising from a trial of sex education. Examination o...

OBJECTIVE To assess the performance of the universal newborn hearing screen in England. DESIGN Retrospective analysis of population screening records. STUDY SAMPLE A total of 4 645 823 children born 1 April 2004 to 31 March 2013. RESULTS 97.5% of the eligible population complete screening by 4/5 weeks of age and 98.9% complete screening by three months of age. The refer rate for the 12/13...

Accurate rates of herpes zoster incidence and complication have become of greater interest as studies have suggested an increasing temporal trend in incidence rates across all age groups and long-term follow-up studies of vaccine effectiveness are required by the Food and Drug Administration. This study compares the results obtained from the most commonly used method to obtain herpes zoster dat...

BACKGROUND Day-care surgery is a common procedure in most of the hospitals. It has the advantages of early discharge and thus contributes to cost effectiveness. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to compare the feasibility of day-care surgery in rural and urban patients. MATERIAL AND METHODS Around 200 cases undergoing day-care surgeries of various types in urban and rural patient were en...

Undergraduate students may be attracted to science and retained in science by engaging in laboratory research. Experience as an apprentice in a scientist's laboratory can be effective in this regard, but the pool of willing scientists is sometimes limited and sustained contact between students and faculty is sometimes minimal. We report outcomes from two different models of a summer neuroscienc...

OBJECTIVES To test the hypothesis that family intervention to promote effective parenting in early childhood affects obesity in preadolescence. METHODS Participants were 186 minority youth at risk for behavior problems who enrolled in long-term follow-up studies after random assignment to family intervention or control condition at age 4. Follow-up Study 1 included 40 girls at familial risk f...

108 Psychotic and 268 epileptic patients were followed up for 3½ years as a part of an ongoing rural mental health care programme. Some of the observed situations, possible limitations and reasons for the evolved follow up pattern in this endeavour of non-institutional, family centred and community oriented treatment programme, are reported. The strategies to improve the follow up rate among th...

Little is known about the long-term effects of homeopathic treatment. Following a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of classical homeopathy in chronic headaches, we conducted a complete follow-up study of all trial participants. All patients enrolled in the double-blind study were sent a 6-week headache diary, a follow-up questionnaire. Eighty-seven of the original 98 patients enrolled ret...

In the MRC/Derbyshire Smoking Study a cohort of about 6000 adolescents was surveyed annually from 1974 when they entered secondary school aged 11-12 years until 1978 when they reached 15-16 years. In 1981 after the adolescents had left school they were again surveyed by post. Each year from 1974 to 1978 and again in 1981 they answered a questionnaire on their smoking behaviour and other issues....