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...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the short-term effect of parent-administered physical therapy in the preterm period on motor performance in medically stable infants. METHODS This study was a pragmatic, multicenter, randomized controlled trial including 153 infants born at gestational age ≤32 weeks and randomized to an intervention (n = 74) or a control (n = 79) group. The intervention promoted postu...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the abilities of weight and length velocities vs attained growth measures to predict stunting, wasting, and underweight at age 2 years. STUDY DESIGN We analyzed data from a community-based cohort study (The Etiology, Risk Factors, and Interactions of Enteric Infections and Malnutrition and the Consequences for Child Health and Development study [MAL-ED] study) in Bhaktap...

Reliable methods for measuring the thoracic aorta are critical for determining treatment strategies in aneurysmal disease. Z-scores are a pragmatic alternative to raw diameter sizes commonly used in adult medicine. They are particularly valuable in the pediatric population, who undergo rapid changes in physical development. The advantage of the Z-score is its inclusion of body surface area (BSA...

OBJECTIVE To analyse the effects of zinc supplementation on growth parameters in a representative sample of young children in rural Burkina Faso. Design Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled efficacy trial. Setting Eighteen villages in rural northwestern Burkina Faso. Subjects In all, 709 children aged 6-31 months were enrolled; 685 completed the trial. Intervention Supplementation with ...

Protein structure prediction is one of the most important and difficult problems in computational molecular biology. Protein threading represents one of the most promising techniques for this problem. One of the critical steps in protein threading, called fold recognition, is to choose the best-fit template for the query protein with the structure to be predicted. The standard method for templa...

BACKGROUND Accelerated infant growth is associated with an altered, mostly adverse adult cardiometabolic risk profile. The importance of genetic and environmental factors to these associations is unclear. OBJECTIVE The objective was to examine the importance of genetic and environmental factors in the associations between infant growth and adult cardiometabolic risk factors (anthropometric ch...

The work reported here sought to describe the feeding patterns of Chilean children up to 18 months old and their relation to nutritional status. To this end, a survey was conducted in 1993 of 9330 Chilean children under 18 months old who were receiving care through the National Health Service System-which provides care for 75% of all children under age 6. The children, whose mothers or caretake...

BACKGROUND To our knowledge, no studies have reported on the long-term variability of vitamin D status in adolescents. OBJECTIVE To determine whether tracking of vitamin D status occurs in healthy adolescents, we assessed the variability of 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] every 2 y over a 10-y period in a longitudinal cohort of adolescents living in Johannesburg, South Africa (latitude 26°S). ...

This study was conducted to investigate growth and the complications in the hospitalized pediatric patients receiving either enteral (n = 26) or parenteral (n = 15) nutrition. Anthropometric measures as well as the results of biochemical analyses and complete blood counts were recorded. Weight, height and weight for height were expressed in z scores. The improvement in z scores for the 26 child...