Background: There are few studies on the epidemiology of epilepsy in large populations in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC). Most studies in these regions use two-stage population-based screening surveys, which are time-consuming and costly to implement in large populations required to generate accurate estimates. We examined the sensitivity and specificity of a three-stage cross-sectional...

Background: The PROBIT methodology was presented in the 1995 World Health Organization Technical Report on Anthropometry as an alternative to the standard prevalence based method of measuring malnutrition in children. Theoretically the PROBIT method will always give a smaller standard error than the standard prevalence method in measuring malnutrition. A recent article by Dale et al. assessed t...

Background: Effective interventions require evidence on how individual causal pathways jointly determine disease. Based on the concept of systems epidemiology, this paper develops Diagram-based Analysis of Causal Systems (DACS) as an approach to analyze complex systems, and applies it by examining the contributions of proximal and distal determinants of childhood acute lower respiratory infecti...

Background: The study of non-atopic asthma/wheeze in children separately from atopic asthma is relatively recent. Studies have focused on single risk factors and had inconsistent findings. Objective: To review evidence on factors associated with non-atopic asthma/wheeze in children and adolescents. Methods: A review of studies of risk factors for non-atopic asthma/wheeze which had a non-asthmat...

Background: Laboratory testing in clinical practice is never a random process. In this study we evaluated testing bias for neutrophil counts in clinical practice by using results from requested and non-requested hematological blood tests. Methods: This study was conducted using data from the Utrecht Patient Oriented Database. This clinical database is unique, as it contains physician requested ...

This journal promised 6 years ago to publish studies on what it termed “CSCL and its flash themes” (Stahl 2007). Rather than devoting single issues to specific topics of timely prominence, we decided to welcome submissions about selected emerging themes of CSCL research on an on-going basis. Accordingly, we set aflame again in the current issue discussion of the topics of argumentation, scripti...

A summary of the major themes that emerged over the two days.