The growth in protein sequence data has placed a premium on ways to infer structure and function of the newly sequenced proteins. One of the most effective ways is to identify a homologous relationship with a protein about which more is known. While close evolutionary relationships can be confidently determined with standard methods, the difficulty increases as the relationships become more dis...

BACKGROUND Pathways leading to socioeconomic inequalities in young children's body mass index (BMI) are not well understood. This study examined whether parenting related to the physical and social context of children's food consumption helped to explain associations between maternal educational level and child BMI trajectory. METHODS The study used data from 2957 families in a nationally rep...

BACKGROUND Evidence for the effect of dietary energy on BMI z-scores in young children is limited. We aim to investigate cross-sectional and longitudinal effects of daily energy intake (EI) on BMI z-scores of European boys and girls considering growth-related height dependencies of EI using residual EI. METHODS To investigate cross-sectional and longitudinal effects of daily energy intake (EI...

Background. Given the cardiovascular disease (CVD) related importance of understanding the true effects of exercise on adiposity in overweight and obese children and adolescents, this study examined whether there is evidential value to rule out excessive and inappropriate reporting of statistically significant results, a major problem in the published literature, with respect to exercise-induce...

Background: Despite the continued high prevalence of faltering growth, height monitoring remains limited in many low- and middle-income countries.Objective: The objective of this study was to test whether providing parents with information on their child's height can improve children's height and developmental outcomes.Design: Villages in Chipata District, Zambia (n = 127), were randomly assign...

Hypertension is fast becoming a major public health problem across sub-Saharan Africa. We sought to determine the prevalence of high blood pressure (BP) and associated risk factors as indicator of preclinical hypertension in a rural Gambian population.We analyzed data on 6160 healthy Gambians cross-sectionally. Attention was given to 5 to <18-year olds (N = 3637), as data from sub-Saharan Afric...

BACKGROUND Exercise training lowers blood pressure (BP), while BP increases and returns to pre-training values with detraining. Yet, there is considerable variability in these BP responses. We examined the relationship between the BP responses after 6 months of training followed by 2 weeks of detraining among the same people. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Subjects (n = 75) (X+SD, 50.2 ± 10.6...

BACKGROUND The California Tobacco Control Program (CTCP) has employed strategies to change social norms around smoking in order to decrease the prevalence of smoking and tobacco-related diseases. Research is scarce on CTCP's impact on overall smoking cessation in California. METHODS Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey (TUS-CPS) data from 1992-1993 to 2006-2007 was used to ...

OBJECTIVE To examine beneficial or detrimental effects of protease inhibitor (PI)-containing antiretroviral regimens on height and weight growth in children with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. METHODS A prospective cohort study was conducted of 906 HIV-infected children, from pediatric research clinics in the United States, who were between 3 months and 18 years of age and who ...

We present the first direct comparison of language production in brain-injured children and adults, using age-corrected z scores for multiple lexical and grammatical measures. Spontaneous speech samples were elicited in a structured biographical interview from 38 children (5-8 years of age), 24 with congenital left-hemisphere damage (LHD) and 14 with congenital right-hemisphere damage (RHD), co...