OBJECTIVE To describe smoking habits and to identify their determinants in adolescent students. METHODS A cross-sectional study was carried out on smoking habits comprising 1,052 girls and 984 boys aged 13 years attending public and private schools in the city of Porto, Portugal. The proportion of participation was 77.5%. Information on sociodemographic and behavioral characteristics was obta...

BACKGROUND Population growth and use of the car in daily life entails new incidents and accidents everyday. Adolescents' entering the new world of adults, their insufficient knowledge of rules, and high-risk behaviors expose them to more risks. Accordingly, a study was conducted with the aim to evaluate the status of preventive behaviors in traffic accidents in boy and girl junior high school s...

background and purpose: decreased males’ motivation for entering universities has caused a low male/female ratio in different university majors. in 2005-2006 academic year, enrollment of female students in rafsanjan university of medical sciences reached 83.14%. this tremendous gender imbalance may lead to the development of a mono-sex system for health service providers and will.affect the soc...

OBJECTIVE To describe the growth pattern from birth to 2 years of UK-born white British and Pakistani infants. DESIGN Birth cohort. SETTING Bradford, UK. PARTICIPANTS 314 white British boys, 383 Pakistani boys, 328 white British girls and 409 Pakistani girls. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Weight and length trajectories based on repeat measurements from birth to 2 years. RESULTS Linear spline ...

Gender color-coding of children's toys may make certain toys more appealing or less appealing to a given gender. We observed toddlers playing with two gender-typical toys (a train, a doll), once in gender-typical colors and once in gender-atypical colors. Assessments occurred twice, at 20-40 months of age and at 26-47 months of age. A Sex × Time × Toy × Color ANOVA showed expected interactions ...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the factors associated with sexual risk behavior in adolescent girls and boys in order to plan future school health interventions. METHODS A cross-sectional study with two-stage cluster sampling that included 97 schools and 9,340 students aged between 14 and 16 years old was carried out in 2005-2006 in Catalonia (Spain). For the survey, a self-administered paper-based que...

OBJECTIVE To describe food habits and associated sociodemographic factors. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey in 2005. SETTING Ninety-six school classes in Ramallah, Nablus and Hebron governorates, Occupied Palestinian Territory. SUBJECTS Grade 8 and 9 students aged 13-15 years (n 2952). METHODS Self-administered student and parent questionnaires. RESULTS High standard of living (STL) inde...

To obtain blood pressure distribution for Iranian children, we assessed 10,288 students aged 6-13 years (4871 boys and 5417 girls) in Tehran. Mean systolic and diastolic blood pressure showed incremental increases with age, weight and height in both sexes. Mean increases in systolic blood pressure for boys and girls were 1.7 and 0.8 mmHg per year respectively and for diastolic blood pressure we...

BACKGROUND Intense physical activity (PA) improves muscle strength in children, but it remains uncertain whether moderately intense PA in a population-based cohort of children confers these benefits. METHODS We included children aged 6-9 years in four schools where the intervention school increased the school curriculum of PA from 60 minutes/week to 40 minutes/school day while the control sch...