Little is known about lead exposure in the general population of young adults. In this study, whole blood lead concentration (PbB) was determined in a sample of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, a well-documented birth cohort of New Zealanders aged 21 years in 1993-1994. PbB in those who consented to venipuncture at 21 years of age (n = 779; 411 males, 368 females) was...

OBJECTIVE There have been concerns about impacts of various aspects of taking part in research studies for a century. The concerns have not, however, been sufficiently well conceptualized to form traditions of study capable of defining and elaborating the nature of these problems. In this article we present a new way of thinking about a set of issues attracting long-standing attention. STUDY ...

Generally, health does not improve with age, and many physical and physiological functions are known to decline. These changes do not occur uniformly, however; for many reasons, some people experience significant improvement in their health over non-trivial time intervals. Earlier, we showed that 5-year transitions in health status in elderly people (age 65+ years) can be modeled as a stochasti...

Early childhood caries is a persistent worldwide problem. The etiologic contribution of feeding practices has been less frequently investigated in prospective studies of young children. The Porto Alegre Early Life Nutrition and Health Study has followed a birth cohort of 715 mother-child pairs, recruited from municipal health centers, originally involved in a cluster-randomized controlled trial...

OBJECTIVE To assess factors associated to leisure-time physical activity and sedentary lifestyle. METHODS Prospective cohort study of people born in 1982 in the city of Pelotas, southern Brazil. Data were collected at birth and during in a visit in 2004-5 when 77.4% of the cohort were evaluated, making a total of 4,297 people studied. Information about leisure-time physical activity was colle...

OBJECTIVES To explore cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between self-reported and accelerometry-based physical activity (PA) and blood pressure (BP) between 11 and 14 years of age. METHODS Prospective birth cohort study in Pelotas, Brazil. Participants were 427 cohort members who were followed up with at 11, 12, and 14 years of age, and had questionnaire data on PA and BP at 11 an...

OBJECTIVES Early childhood poverty is associated with adult chronic diseases. The objectives of this study were to examine patterns of exposure to poverty during the first 10 years of life in the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development (QLSCD) cohort according to three measures of poverty and to explore family characteristics associated with different poverty exposures. METHOD Data fro...

The aim of this study was to describe oral health follow-up studies nested in a birth cohort. A population-based birth cohort was launched in 1993 in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil. Two oral health follow-up studies were conducted at six (n = 359) and 12 (n = 339) years of age. A high response rate was observed at 12 years of age; 94.4% of the children examined at six years of age wer...

This study aimed to examine the reproducibility and validity of a new food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) used in a birth cohort study to estimate the usual consumption frequencies of foods during pregnancy. The reference measure was the average of three inconsecutive 24 h diet recalls (24 HR) administrated between two FFQs, and the reproducibility was measured by repeating the first FFQ (FFQ1) ...

We examine how income influences pre-school children’s cognitive and behavioral development, using new data from a birth cohort study of children born at the end of the 20 century. On average, low income children have lower PPVT scores, more mother-reported aggressive, withdrawn, and anxious behavior problems, and also more interviewer-reported problems with behavior, than more affluent childre...