Researchers have long viewed large, longitudinal studies as essential for understanding chronic illness and generally superior to cross-sectional studies. In this study, we show that (1) age-specific arthritis prevalence in the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study (HRS) from the United States has risen sharply since its inception in 1992, and (2) this rise is almost surely spurious. In peri...

BACKGROUND The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) is a network of health-related telephone surveys--conducted by all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and participating US territories-that receive technical assistance from CDC. Data users often aggregate BRFSS state samples for national estimates without accounting for state-level sampling, a practice that could introduce bia...

Because of the relationship with subsistence, dental caries is a central issue in paleopathological research. Usually, comparisons between caries prevalence exhibited in different skeletal series are made. Dietary variation is the most common explanation for cavities prevalence. The aim of this paper is to verify if it is possible to compare caries prevalence reported on papers for archaeologic...

Long-term streamflow data are vital for analysis of hydrological droughts. Using an artificial neural network (ANN) model and nine tree-ring indices, this study reconstructed the annual streamflow of the Sacramento River for the period from 1560 to 1871. Using the reconstructed streamflow data, the copula method was used for bivariate drought analysis, deriving a hydrological drought return per...

BACKGROUND There is no documented demographical study on Iranian Parkinson's disease (PD) patients, so this study was conducted to identify demographic information about patients with PD in Iran, and to explore demographical differences between PD patients in Iran and other countries. METHODS We reviewed medical records of 1656 patients diagnosed with PD, who referred from all parts of Iran t...

Expansion of commercial vegetable production in Kentucky prompted the updating of the 1998 commercial vegetable budget estimates for Kentucky’s major commercial vegetables in 2000. Updates continued throughout subsequent seasons. These estimated returns to land, labor, and management sought to convey a conservative profitability estimate for comparative purposes among existing and potential com...

Previous studies of survey data from the U.S. and other countries find that women tend to understate their body weight on average, while both men and women overstate their height on average. Social norms have been posited as one potential explanation for misreporting of weight and height, but lack of awareness of body weight has been suggested as an alternative explanation, and the evidence pre...

—The North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) is an annual transect point-count survey of >500 species and >3,500 survey routes (transects). Observers drive and record birds seen and heard within a radius of 400 m of 50 survey points (“stops”) evenly spaced along a 39.4-km survey route. Thus, the land area along both sides of a route composes a linear or curvilinear landscape. Although BBS dat...

In 1989 an estimated 33.9 million persons in the civilian noninstitu­ tionalized population of the United States (13.9 percent) were reported to lack health care coverage. This point-prevalence estimate represents an average for 52 weeks of household interviews conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census for the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). It is a measure of a person’s coverage stat...

A wave of Haitian immigration into Brazil began in February 2010 through three northern border states: Acre, Rondônia, and Amazonas. Focusing on the state of Amazonas, the article uses an ethnographic approach to explore the social networks involved in this immigrant issue and examines how Brazil’s Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) responded to the demands placed by this unexpected contingent of new...