Studies of environmental exposures and adverse birth outcomes often rely on maternal address at birth obtained from the birth certificate to classify exposure. Although the gestational age of interest is often early pregnancy, maternal addresses are not available for women who move during pregnancy when using maternal addresses abstracted from birth certificates. The aim of this study was to ex...

Aims: To evaluate selected birth outcomes from a published Norwegian cohort study in a nested case-control design with improved exposure data. Methods: Two controls matched for sex, year of birth, and municipality were selected randomly for children with the following defects: central nervous system (CNS) defects, cardiac defects, respiratory system defects, oesophageal defects, and clubfoot. T...

The highest velocity neutron stars establish stringent constraints on natal kicks, asymmetries in supernova core collapse, and the evolution of close binary systems. Here we present the first results of a long-term pulsar astrometry program using the VLBA. We measure a proper motion and parallax for the pulsar B1508+55, leading to model-independent estimates of its distance (2.37 −0.20 kpc) and...

AIMS To evaluate selected birth outcomes from a published Norwegian cohort study in a nested case-control design with improved exposure data. METHODS Two controls matched for sex, year of birth, and municipality were selected randomly for children with the following defects: central nervous system (CNS) defects, cardiac defects, respiratory system defects, oesophageal defects, and clubfoot. T...

Motivated by certain birth–death processes with strongly "uctuating birth rates, we consider a level-crossing problem for a random process being a superposition of a continuous drift to the left and jumps to the right. The lengths of the corresponding jumps follow a one-sided extreme L! evy-law of index !. We concentrate on the case 0¡ !¡ 1 and discuss the probability of crossing a left boundar...

Exposing a pregnant sow to stress has been shown to affect the resulting offspring. Our objective was to determine if rough handling of pregnant sows altered the physiology of her offspring and if these alterations were different from an experimentally induced model of prenatal stress. Sow treatments consisted of i.v. injections of ACTH (1 IU/kg of BW), exposure to rough handling for 10 min (Ro...

In many analyses of animal genotype with the methods of quantitative genetics there is a need to account for relationships among individuals. Incorrectly calculated relationship coefficients may lead to biased estimates. The number of software packages exist which deal with that problem; however, in many of them it is assumed that pedigrees of the individuals are sorted chronologically, but in ...

Tendon transfers in birth brachial plexus palsy Many patients with birth brachial plexus palsy (BBPP) have good spontaneous recovery. This is because the injury is a low velocity injury compared to the adult palsy and hence the injury is mostly a stretch injury which has high potential to recover. Even if there is rupture of the roots the distance to bridge and to travel to the destination is c...

BACKGROUND Birth defects, which are the major cause of infant mortality and a leading cause of disability, refer to "Any anomaly, functional or structural, that presents in infancy or later in life and is caused by events preceding birth, whether inherited, or acquired (ICBDMS)". However, the risk factors associated with heredity and/or environment are very difficult to filter out accurately. T...