BACKGROUND Children of mothers who smoked during pregnancy have a lower birth weight but have a higher chance to become overweight during childhood. OBJECTIVES We followed children longitudinally to assess the age when higher body mass index (BMI) z-scores became evident in the children of mothers who smoked during pregnancy, and to evaluate the trajectory of changes until adolescence. METH...

BACKGROUND Available studies of the built environment and the BMI of children and youth suggest a contemporaneous association with neighborhood greenness in neighborhoods with high population density. The current study tests whether greenness and residential density are independently associated with 2-year changes in the BMI of children and youth. METHODS The sample included children and yout...

OBJECTIVE To assess whether a food variety score (FVS) and/or a dietary diversity score (DDS) are good indicators of nutrient adequacy of the diet of South African children. METHODS Secondary data analyses were undertaken with nationally representative data of 1-8-year-old children (n = 2200) studied in the National Food Consumption Study in 1999. An average FVS (mean number of different food...

background: expansion of bone marrow cavity and decreased cortical and trabecular bone tissues and osteoporosis are resulted from beta-thalassemia. the aim of this study was to assess bone mineral density (bmd) in patients with β thalassemia major and intermedia, and to determine their biochemical and hormonal profiles that may affect bmd. materials and methods: in a cross sectional study from ...

Studies of lattice models of proteins have suggested that the appropriate energy expression for protein design may include nonthermodynamic terms to accommodate negative design concerns. One method, developed in lattice model studies, maximizes a quantity known as the " Z-score," which compares the lowest energy sequence whose ground state structure is the target structure to an ensemble of ran...

Using supervised and unsupervised features individually or together, we (a) detect and filter out noisy workers via Z-score, and (b) weight worker votes for consensus labeling. We evaluate on noisy labels from Amazon Mechanical Turk in which workers judge Web search relevance of query/document pairs. In comparison to a majority vote baseline, results show a 6% error reduction (48.83% to 51.91%)...

Objectives. Children with JIA can experience delayed and restricted growth. The objectives of this study were to investigate the influence of etanercept (ETN) on vertical growth and factors associated with improved growth in patients with JIA over the initial 2 years of treatment. Methods. This analysis was restricted to ETN-treated patients in the British Society for Paediatric and Adolescent ...

BACKGROUND Allograft dysfunction is a common finding early after heart transplant (HT). We sought to assess the recovery of left (LV) and right ventricular (RV) function during the first year after HT in children and young adults using pulsed-wave tissue Doppler imaging. METHODS AND RESULTS We analyzed serially performed echocardiography in 44 pediatric HT recipients (median age: 7.3 years at...

BACKGROUND There is a need for validation of noninvasive alternatives to liver biopsy for the evaluation of fibrosis in children with chronic hepatitis C (CHC). The aim of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic performance of serum biomarkers modified by the body mass index z-score (BMI z-score) for the detection of fibrosis and steatosis in children with CHC. METHODS Thirty children aged ...