OBJECTIVE To compare estimates of dental service use and delayed dental care across 4 national surveys of children's health. METHODS Among children 2 to 17 years of age, prevalence estimates of the use of any dental services, preventive dental services, and delayed dental care in the past year were obtained from the 2003 and 2007 National Survey of Children's Health, the 2003-2004 National He...

Asthma was the most common underlying condition among persons hospitalized with pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus infection in 2009. Although persons with asthma are not more likely than others to get influenza, influenza can make asthma symptoms worse, trigger asthma attacks, and lead to pneumonia or other complications that result in hospitalization and even death. During 1964-2010, the Advis...

KEY FINDINGS Data from the National Health Interview Survey, 2008-2012. The percentage of young adults with private health insurance coverage increased from the last 6 months of 2010 through the last 6 months of 2012 (52.0% to 57.9%). Except for an increase in the first 6 months of 2011, the percentage of privately insured young adults who had a gap in coverage during the past 12 months decreas...

While sleep disturbance has been related to a number of negative health outcomes, few studies have examined the relationship between place of birth and sleep duration among individuals living in the US. Data for 416,152 adult participants in the 2000-2013 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), who provided self-reported hours of sleep and place of birth were examined. Associations were explor...

OBJECTIVE To draw on the experiences under Massachusetts's 2006 reform, the template for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), to provide insights into the potential impacts of the ACA Medicaid expansion for low-income childless adults in other states. DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING The study takes advantage of the natural experiment in Massachusetts and combined data from two surveys-the Massachusetts ...

Substantial uncertainty exists regarding the causal effect of health insurance on the utilization of care. Most studies cannot determine whether the large differences in healthcare utilization between the insured and the uninsured are due to insurance status or to other unobserved differences between the two groups. In this paper, we exploit a sharp change in insurance coverage rates that resul...

OBJECTIVES The National Survey of Early Childhood Health (NSECH) is a new survey that was designed to provide nationally representative data on the health and development of children and to fill an information gap in the pediatric literature on parents' views of the delivery of health care to their young children. DESIGN The selection of topics was guided by previous studies conducted to exam...

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS — Using data from the 1999–2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 998 adults aged 18 years with self-reported diabetes were identified. The proportion of adults with diabetes meeting ADA recommendations for HbA 1c (A1C), HDL cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, renal function, nutrient intake, smoking, pneumococcal vaccination,...

Births to women living in the United States are tracked throughout the year by the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), which is overseen by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). While the NVSS provides administrative counts of births in the United States and basic characteristics of the mothers such as age, race, and marital status, other characteristics of the mother may provi...