Cardiovascular risk factors have been analyzed as part of a combined ethnographic, anthropometric, and medical study of 1390 adult subjects in defined populations representing six Solomon Islands Societies. The six societies, all at low levels of acculturation, differed in habitat, way of life, and exposure to Western civilization. Criteria for ranking the societies in respect to acculturation ...

With the overthrow of the Shah and the rise to power of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, Iran changed from a monarchy to an Islamic regime based on an Islamic Constitution and Islamic laws. As a result, a western stereotype of Iranian women as veiled and helpless creatures got created. This stereotypical view has dominated public opinion since 1979 in both Western societies in general, and among wes...

OBJECTIVE Filicide, or parental murder of offspring, constitutes a major portion of lethal violence perpetrated against children worldwide. Despite the global nature of the phenomenon, researchers have focused their studies on the developed industrialized societies with the consequent neglect of small, developing societies. Second, there is a paucity of empirical data on child homicide committe...

Introduction This paper discusses the case for decriminalization of cannabis use, based on a careful weighting of the currently available evidence regarding advantages and risks of such a policy change. The issue of decriminalization is a response to the widespread use of cannabis in spite of its current illegal status; that is, as a consequence of the perceived ineffectiveness of the tradition...

The spectacular fall in cardiovascular mortality that has occurred in most western societies in the past 40 years has contributed significantly to a steady rise in life expectancy. The Royal Dutch Actuarial Association has estimated, in its ‘Projection Table 2016’, that the life expectancy of a girl born in 2016 is 93.0 years and that of a boy born in 2016 90.1 years [1]. With a touch of optimi...

BACKGROUND Although Asian societies are remarkably different from Western societies in terms of sociocultural characteristics, little is known about the gender differences in the health effects of marriage and marital satisfaction in Asian countries. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Using a randomly sampled dataset from the 2006 East Asian Social Survey comprising 8528 individuals from China, J...

OBJECTIVES Research has implicated education as an important predictor of physical functioning in old age. Older adults in Taiwan tend to experience tight familial integration and high rates of adult-child coresidency-much more so than is typical in Western cultures-which might imply additional influences stemming from the education of children. This could arise in a number of ways; for instanc...