OBJECTIVE To verify the impact of a health education program on elderly patients' knowledge of cardiovascular diseases. METHODS A qualitative study with a participatory approach. The population was composed of seven elderly patients who took part in eight educational interventions on issues related to cardiovascular health. The data was analyzed with thematic content analysis. RESULTS The c...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the prevalence of obesity and to identify its potential determinants to optimize the methods of prevention to combat further increases in childhood overweight. The study was carried out on 3444 school children of 6-10 years of age attending 30 schools in northeast Romania. Schools were classified by geographical location and socioeconomic status (SES). O...

BACKGROUND In the context of crisis and disasters, school-aged children are a vulnerable group with fewer coping resources than adults. The school is a key arena for preventive interventions; teachers can be given a key role in large-scale school-based interventions following a man-made or natural disaster. OBJECTIVES This paper describes a practical example of designing a school-based popula...

INTRODUCTION Although biomedical HIV prevention efforts have seen a number of recent promising developments, behavioural interventions have often been described as failing. However, clear lessons have been identified from past efforts, including the need to address influential social, economic and legal structures; to tailor efforts to local contexts; and to address multiple influencing factors...

BACKGROUND Despite the proliferation of health information technology (IT) interventions, descriptions of the unique considerations for conducting randomized trials of health IT interventions intended for patient use are lacking. PURPOSE Our purpose is to describe the protocol to evaluate Pocket PATH (Personal Assistant for Tracking Health), a novel health IT intervention, as an exemplar of h...

BACKGROUND Although the optimization of behavioral interventions offers the potential of both public health and research benefits, currently there is no widely agreed-upon principled procedure for accomplishing this. PURPOSE This article suggests a multiphase optimization strategy (MOST) for achieving the dual goals of program optimization and program evaluation in the behavioral intervention...

The recognition of a strong etiological relationship between infection with high-risk human papillomavirusses and cervical cancer has prompted research to develop and evaluate prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines. One prophylactic quadrivalent vaccine using L1 virus-like particles (VLP) of HPV 6, 11, 16 and 18 is available on the European market since the end of 2006 and it is expected that a ...

BACKGROUND Smoking within students community of the medical sciences can negatively impact the attitudesof the society in future. The objectives of this study were to assess the prevalence and trends of smoking amongstudents of Tehran University of Medical Sciences. METHOD This study was conducted in four consecutive years from 2006 to 2009. The study sample was takenfrom the first- to fourth...

This study examined a highly successful, well-documented, national program to prevent teenage pregnancy and school failure-the Teen Outreach program-to address a fundamental question: How well can a developmentally focused, broadly targeted prevention program address the needs of those students within the program who are at the highest risk of problematic behavior. The hypothesis that the devel...

The term psychogenomics is used here to describe the process of applying the powerful tools of genomics and proteomics to achieve a better understanding of the biological substrates of normal behavior and of diseases of the brain that manifest themselves as behavioral abnormalities. Applying psychogenomics to the study of drug addiction will lead to the identification of genes and their protein...