OBJECTIVE To assess the relationship between insulin resistance and body mass index (BMI) z score associated with dietary modification that focuses on limiting sweetened beverage consumption in overweight children. DESIGN A retrospective cohort study conducted between July 1, 2004, and April 28, 2006. SETTING Community-based primary care practices treating children. PATIENTS Forty-five ch...

In Afghanistan, malnutrition in children less than 60 months of age remains high despite nutritional services being offered in health facilities since 2003. Afghanistan's Ministry of Public Health solicited extensive community consultation to develop pictorial community-based growth monitoring and promotion (cGMP) tools to help illiterate community health workers (CHWs) provide nutritional asse...

BACKGROUND The recent finding that aortic pulse wave velocity (aPWV) is increased in patients with inflammatory bowel disease may explain why the cardiovascular risk is increased despite the low prevalence of traditional cardiovascular risk factors. We aimed to test whether inflammation is associated with aortic stiffening in this setting after adjustment for major confounders and to perform su...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have suggested that some children with autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease (ARPKD) have growth impairment out of proportion to their degree of chronic kidney disease (CKD). The objective of this study was to systematically compare growth parameters in children with ARPKD to those with other congenital causes of CKD in the chronic kidney disease in Children ...

OBJECTIVES To develop an index of the quality of nutritional care of premature infants based on the change in weight Z score from birth to discharge and to illustrate the use of this index in comparing the performance of different NICUs. METHODS Retrospective data analysis was performed to compare the growth of premature infants born in three perinatal centers. Infants with gestational age ≤ ...

background: standardization of the semen analysis may improve reproducibility. we assessed variability between laboratories in semen analyses and evaluated whether a transformation using z scores and regression statistics was able to reduce this variability. materials and methods: we performed a retrospective cohort study. we calculated between-laboratory coefficients of variation (cvb) for spe...

Standard ranges of atomic and residue volumes are computed in 64 highly resolved and well-refined protein crystal structures using the classical Voronoi procedure. Deviations of the atomic volumes from the standard values, evaluated as the volume Z-scores, are used to assess the quality of protein crystal structures. To score a structure globally, we compute the volume Z-score root mean square ...