OBJECTIVES To examine age related changes in physical functioning in elderly men and women. DESIGN Prospective, population based study. SETTING Population of 15 rural and urban centres in 10 European countries. PARTICIPANTS Altogether 3496 men and women born between 1900 and 1920 who participated in the baseline survey of the HALE project in 1988-1991. The study population was examined ag...

Little is known about lead exposure in the general population of young adults. In this study, whole blood lead concentration (PbB) was determined in a sample of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, a well-documented birth cohort of New Zealanders aged 21 years in 1993-1994. PbB in those who consented to venipuncture at 21 years of age (n = 779; 411 males, 368 females) was...

Generally, health does not improve with age, and many physical and physiological functions are known to decline. These changes do not occur uniformly, however; for many reasons, some people experience significant improvement in their health over non-trivial time intervals. Earlier, we showed that 5-year transitions in health status in elderly people (age 65+ years) can be modeled as a stochasti...

Early childhood caries is a persistent worldwide problem. The etiologic contribution of feeding practices has been less frequently investigated in prospective studies of young children. The Porto Alegre Early Life Nutrition and Health Study has followed a birth cohort of 715 mother-child pairs, recruited from municipal health centers, originally involved in a cluster-randomized controlled trial...

OBJECTIVES To explore cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between self-reported and accelerometry-based physical activity (PA) and blood pressure (BP) between 11 and 14 years of age. METHODS Prospective birth cohort study in Pelotas, Brazil. Participants were 427 cohort members who were followed up with at 11, 12, and 14 years of age, and had questionnaire data on PA and BP at 11 an...

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...