This chapter examines the association between poverty and tobacco use. It provides a comprehensive review of the data on smoking prevalence and consumption levels in different socio-economic groups, both within individual countries and internationally. It finds that smoking is more common among poor men (variously defined by income, education, occupation, or social class) than rich men in nearl...

BACKGROUND Body mass index (BMI) can be used to group individuals in terms of their height and weight as obese. However, such a distinction fails to account for the variation within this group across other factors such as health, demographic and behavioural characteristics. The study aims to examine the existence of subgroups of obese individuals. METHODS Data were taken from the Yorkshire He...

Automatic writer identification and writer verification has recently received significant attention in the field of historical analysis. In this work a short overview of current approaches for writer identification is given. Current state-of-the-art results on contemporary data are related to different approaches for writer verification on a small dataset of datum lines extracted from papal cha...

The image of Roger Bacon as a 'modern' experimental scientist was propagated as historical truth in 19th century scientific historiography. Twentieth century criticisms attacked this tradition, arguing that Bacon was primarily a medieval philosopher with 'medieval' scientific interests. However, recent scholarship has provided a more careful and critical account of Bacon's science, and identifi...

T o our knowledge, there has never been a historical treatise on the concept of middle age or middle adulthood (we will use these terms interchangeably throughout this chapter) within lifespan developmental psychology and lifespan developmental science. At most, the role of adult development in the middle of the life cycle has been touched on here and there in historical treatises such as Groff...

Background & aim: Breast, cervical, and colorectal cancers are the leading causes of mortality among women, the incidence rate of which has an upward trend with advancing age. Although cost-effective, easy, and available screening programs can help control these types of cancer in their early stages, it seems that cancer screening programs have not been implemented effectively. In this study, w...

Detection thresholds for sodium chloride were compared in aqueous solution, in mixture with a sucrose masker, in mixture with a citric acid masker, and in mixture with both of these maskers together. Separately the two maskers raised the threshold of sodium chloride by three to four times, and together by over nine times, a result consistent with independence (additivity) of the two masking eff...

Age adjusted incidence rates (World standard) from invasive cervical cancer in the Swiss canton of Vaud decreased from 17.7/100,000 in 1968-70 to 9.9/100,000 in 1983-85. The decline was substantial in younger middle age, but no appreciable trend was observed in women over 70. This is consistent with available interview based information on the pattern of cervical screening in the Swiss populati...

We analyze the effect of an individual insurance mandate (Medicare Levy Surcharge) on the demand for private health insurance (PHI) in Australia. With administrative income tax return data, we show that the mandate has several distinct effects on taxpayers' behavior. First, despite the large tax penalty for not having PHI coverage relative to the cost of the cheapest eligible insurance policy, ...

Although the chronic stress of caring for a sick/disabled relative has been associated with poorer immunity using a range of outcomes, its impact on secretory immunoglobulin A (S-IgA) in saliva has yet to be examined. Three hypotheses were tested in analyses of data from a large community sample: first, caregivers would have lower S-IgA secretion rates than non-caregivers; second, the impact of...