BACKGROUND Epidemiologic studies indicate that infections in early childhood may protect against pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). METHODS We identified 3,402 ALL cases among children 0 to 5 years of age using the California Cancer Registry. From California birth records we randomly selected controls in a 20:1 ratio and frequency matched them to cases by birth year. We investigate...

Background  The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between maternal anemia during pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes. Materials and Methods  This systematic review was conducted in domestic (Sid, Iran.doc, Iran medex and Magiran) and international (PubMed, Science Direct, Cochrane, Medline, Web of Science, Scopus, Springer, Embase, Google scholar) databases from January 1, 1990 t...

James Allen defined a calculus of time intervals in [A1183], as a representation of temporal knowledge that could be used in AI. We shall call this the Interval Culculus. In his paper, Allen investigated specification and constraint satisfaction in the Interval Calculus. Other constraintsatisfaction algorithms for intervals have considered subclasses of Boolean formulas only. The methods herein...

Background and objectives: Birth spacing is an important variable for identification of fertility acceleration, total fertility rate, and maternal and fetal health. Therefore, special attention has been paid to this issue by researchers in the fields of medical sciences, health, and population. In addition, proper analysis of this concept is of foremost importance. Application of classical anal...

Background and objectives: Application of statistical machine learning methods such as ensemble based approaches in survival analysis has been received considerable interest over the past decades in time-to-event data sets. One of these practical methods is survival forests which have been developed in a variety of contexts due to their high precision, non-parametric and non-linear nature. This...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Considerations of both inter-pregnancy intervals and malaria parasitaemia may help in understanding some aspects of susceptibility and pregnancy outcomes in malaria endemic areas. METHODS Pregnant women with asymptomatic malaria parasitaemia were recruited and divided into groups based on their inter-pregnancy intervals and malaria specific-IgG, body mass index, and bi...

Background: Around one out of two mothers give births by cesarean section (CS) surgery in Iran and about half of this number is due to previous CS. Recently Health Sector Evolution (HSEP) program (started in April 2014) targets the high rate of CS in Iran. To assess the impact of the interventions, we emphasized that the First Birth Cesarean (FBC) proportion is one of the main indicators to ass...

Relatives play an important role in human reproduction according to evolutionary theories of reproductive behavior, but previous empirical studies show large differences in the effects of kin on fertility outcomes. In our paper we examine the effect of co-resident kin and non-kin on the length of birth intervals over the reproductive life course of Dutch women born between 1842 and 1920. We est...