In the past, natural scrapie and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) infections have essentially not been diagnosed in sheep homozygous for the A136R154R171 haplotype of the prion protein. This genotype was therefore assumed to confer resistance to BSE and classic scrapie under natural exposure conditions. Hence, to exclude prions from the human food chain, massive breeding efforts have been...

INTRODUCTION The pandemic of obesity in adolescents is one of the challenges of public health. AIM The aim of this study was to examine the association of overweight with demographic, socioeconomic and lifestyle factors among Serbian adolescents. METHOD A cross-sectional study of 2139 adolescents aged 10 to 19 years was carried out. Data used in this study were from the 2006 Health Survey. ...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the association between physical activity, participation in Physical Education classes, and indicators of social isolation among adolescents. METHODS This was an epidemiological study based on secondary analysis of data from a representative sample of students (14-19 years) from public high schools (n=4,207). Data were collected through the questionnaire Global School-bas...

OBJECTIVE This report examines the prevalence and common correlates of early smoking initiation among male and female school children across seven African countries. METHOD The total sample included 17,725 school children aged 13 to 15 years from nationally representative samples in seven African countries. Univariate and multivariate analyses were conducted to assess the relationship between...

BACKGROUND In 2004, routine varicella vaccination was introduced in Germany for children aged 11-14 months. Routine measles vaccination had already been introduced in 1973 for the same age group, but coverage is still too low (<95%) in some areas to eliminate measles. The present study assessed varicella and measles vaccination coverage and determinants of parental acceptance in two study regio...

PURPOSE Adolescents report high asthma-related morbidity that can be prevented by adequate self-management of the disease. Therefore, there is a need for a developmentally appropriate strategy to promote effective asthma self-management. Mobile phone-based technology is portable, commonly accessible, and well received by adolescents. The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate the fea...

It has been proposed that environmental chemicalization is responsible for the recent decline in male ratio, but these speculations are based on statistics going back only a few decades. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether Finnish long-term data are compatible with the hypothesis that the decrease in the ratio of male to female births in industrial countries is caused by environ...

Although most studies of language learning take place in quiet laboratory settings, everyday language learning occurs under noisy conditions. The current research investigated the effects of background speech on word learning. Both younger (22- to 24-month-olds; n = 40) and older (28- to 30-month-olds; n = 40) toddlers successfully learned novel label-object pairings when target speech was 10 d...

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the main cause of visual impairment and blindness in people aged over 65 years in developed countries. Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is a positive regulator of angiogenesis and its proven role in the pathological neovascularization in wet AMD has provided evidence for the use of anti-VEGF agents as potential therapies. In this study, we revi...

The objectives of the present study were to analyze the relationship between victimization and psychological maladjustment in adolescents and the role of self-compassion as a mediator in this relationship. The sample was composed of 109 adolescents aged from 15 to 18 years old with poor school performance. The participants filled out a battery of questionnaires made up of: a socio-demographic d...