OBJECTIVES This study aims to address, for the first time, the challenges of constructing small area estimates of health status using linked national surveys. The study also seeks to assess the concordance of these small area estimates with data from national censuses. SETTING Population level health status in England, Scotland and Wales. PARTICIPANTS A linked integrated dataset of 23 374 s...

The national Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides nutrition education, growth monitoring, breastfeeding promotion and support, and food to low-income pregnant or postpartum women, infants, and children aged <5 years. Several studies have linked WIC services with improved maternal and infant health outcomes. Most population-based studies have lac...

The article by Pan et al. in the May issue shows that the prevalence of myopia is very low in adults from two ethnic groups—Han Chinese and Yi (one of China’s national minority groups) living in the same rural area in Yunnan Province. The very low prevalence of myopia in both groups shows that myopia is not inevitable in East Asian populations, but requires exposure to environmental risk factor...

BACKGROUND Several epidemiological studies have shown consistently higher prevalence rates of obesity and overweight in East German adults compared to West German adults before German reunification in 1990. If different lifestyle factors after German division contribute to these differences, one might speculate that trends of obesity and overweight in the East and West after German reunificatio...

BACKGROUND Two large independent studies funded by the US government have assessed the impact of the Vietnam War on the prevalence of PTSD in US veterans. The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study (NVVRS) estimated the current PTSD prevalence to be 15.2% while the Vietnam Experience Study (VES) estimated the prevalence to be 2.2%. We compared alternative criteria for estimating the preva...

In several studies conducted during the last decade, the synthetic fragrance hydroxyisohexyl 3-cyclohexene carboxaldehyde (HICC; CAS 31906-04-4) has been shown to be a frequent sensitizer, with a prevalence of >2% among patients tested (1–6). Recent publications, however, have reported prevalences of sensitization of <2%, both in Denmark (7) and in Germany (8). However, in the most recent re-an...

OBJECTIVE To determine the prevalence of HIV-1 infection in childbearing women in Nova Scotia. DESIGN An anonymous, unlinked seroprevalence study using "leftover" cord bloods. The study was done in 2 stages: I-Halifax Co. women delivering between February 1, 1992 and December 31, 1993; II-non-Halifax Co. women delivering between November 15, 1993 and December 15, 1994. RESULTS Of 9,115 deli...

BACKGROUND Smoking behaviour among immigrants is assumed to converge to that of the host country's majority population with increasing duration of stay. We compared smoking prevalence among Turkish immigrants residing in two different countries (Germany (DE)/the Netherlands (NL)) between and within countries by time spent in Turkey and DE/NL. METHODS The German 2009 micro-census and the Dutch...

The infectivity function is a function giving a measure of how infectious a given individual is t time units after becoming infected. Today, no feasible and ethically acceptable study design is known, which would lead to estimates of HIV-infection probability within steady heterosexual partnerships, using standard statistical methodology. In this paper a transmission model is used as a link bet...

The authors studied weighting adjustments for the National Comorbidity Survey (1990-1992), a large-scale national epidemiologic investigation of the prevalence, risk factors, and consequences of psychiatric morbidity and comorbidity in the United States. Weighting adjustments for differential selection within households, new construction, unit nonresponse, and poststratification were examined s...