AIMS We sought to examine the fall in age of first drinking in Ireland and to determine whether there were gender differences. We also aimed to determine whether there was a relationship between the per capita alcohol consumption evident when people entered later adolescence and their age of drinking onset. METHODS Information on age of first drinking was based on retrospective recall of 9832...

BACKGROUND Prevalence of obesity is the result of preceding incidence of newly developed obesity and persistence of obesity. We investigated whether increasing incidence and/or persistence during childhood drove the prevalence of childhood obesity during the emerging epidemic. METHODS Height and weight were measured at ages 7 and 13 years in 192,992 Danish school children born 1930-1969. Tren...

This article examines the impact of war-induced ill early childhood health on educational attainment in early adolescence. Using data on a small panel of children we find that children who were malnourished at baseline had on average attained fewer grades than children of the same year of birth cohort who were healthier at baseline. The effect is particularly salient for the older children who ...

The objectives of this overview are to describe the past and potential contributions of birth cohorts to understanding chronic disease aetiology; advance a justification for the maintenance of birth cohorts from low- and middle-income countries (LMIC); provide an audit of birth cohorts from LMIC; and, finally, offer possible future directions for this sphere of research. While the contribution ...

BACKGROUND The declining incidence of schizophrenia observed in several countries is believed by many to merely reflect methodological problems in the studies performed. We report the first nationwide historical cohort study of changes in the incidence of schizophrenia, in which many of the previous methodological problems were overcome. METHODS We used the Finnish Population Register to iden...

INTRODUCTION Understanding the temporal patterns in disease occurrence is valuable for formulating effective disease preventive programs. Cohort studies present a unique opportunity to explore complex interactions associated with emergence of seasonal patterns of infectious diseases. METHODS We used data from 452 children participating in a birth cohort study to assess the seasonal patterns o...

We present a novel approach to the analysis of fluctuations in human myoelectrical gastric activity measured noninvasively from the surface of the abdomen. The time intervals between successive maxima of the wavelet transformed quasi-periodic electrogastrographic waveform define the gastric rate variability (GRV) time series. By using the method of average wavelet coefficients, the statistical ...