Behavioural methods for assessing alcohol dependence of pregnant women

Alcohol-screening instruments for pregnant women.

According to new studies, even low levels of prenatal alcohol exposure can negatively affect the developing fetus, thereby increasing the importance of identifying women who drink during pregnancy. In response, researchers have developed several simple alcohol-screening instruments for use with pregnant women. These instruments, which can be administered quickly and easily, have been evaluated ...

Assessing for psychosocial morbidity in pregnant women.

Voronoi Methods for Assessing Statistical Dependence

In this work, we leverage the intuitive geometry of the Voronoi diagram to develop a new class of methods for quantifying and testing for statistical dependence between real-valued random variables. The contributions of this work are threefold: First, we introduce the utility of probability integral transforms of the datapoints to produce Voronoi diagrams which exhibit desirable properties prov...

Assessing Alcohol Dependence in Hospitalized Patients

Alcohol misuse is generally not detected in hospital settings. The goal of this study was to estimate the prevalence of alcohol abuse and dependence in hospitalized patients in a university hospital in Sao Paulo (Brazil). Patients were randomly selected from all hospital admissions. The final sample consisted of 169 adult inpatients. Two screening tools were used: the Short Alcohol Dependence D...

Assessing caffeine exposure in pregnant women.

Studies on the effects of caffeine on health, while numerous, have produced inconsistent results. One of the most uncertain and controversial effects is on pregnancy outcome. Studies have produced conflicting results due to a number of methodological variations. The major challenge is the accurate assessment of caffeine intake. The aim of the present study was to explore different methods of as...