Accounting for time: insights from a life-table analysis of the efficacy of medical abortion.

Objective: Previously published analyses have ignored the temporal nature of medical abortion and calculated effectiveness as the proportion of abortions that succeed. By using life tables, we incorporate the important element of time to produce unbiased efficacy rates as well as afford insight into the medical abortion process.

Study Design: Using data on 6568 women from 6 previously published mifepristone-misoprostol medical abortion studies, we generated multidecrement life table efficacy curves and evaluated the cumulative probability of successful medical abortion.

Prevalence of overweight and obesity among US children, adolescents, and adults, 1999-2002.

Context: The prevalence of overweight and obesity has increased markedly in the last 2 decades in the United States.

Objective: To update the US prevalence estimates of overweight in children and obesity in adults, using the most recent national data of height and weight measurements.

Design, Setting, And Participants: As part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a complex multistage probability sample of the US noninstitutionalized civilian population, both height and weight measurements were obtained from 4115 adults and 4018 children in 1999-2000 and from 4390 adults and 4258 children in 2001-2002.

Differences in efficacy, differences in providers: results from a hazard analysis of medical abortion.

Sample sizes of even the largest medical abortion trials are generally not adequate to provide an understanding of how well the regimen works for subgroups of women, particularly when controlling for factors known to influence efficacy, such as gestational age. By pooling data from four previously published studies of medical abortion and using hazard analyses, we can undertake such an investigation. We find that women with lower gestational ages, women younger than 23 years of age, women with more than 12 years of education and women with no previous induced abortion experience were more likely to experience a successful medical abortion.

Social linkages to biological markers of health among the elderly.

The social environment and exposure to life challenge affect a person's physical and emotional well-being. The present research uses a population-based study of the elderly in Taiwan to elaborate the cumulative physiological costs--as reflected in biological markers of risk factors known to have adverse consequences for health--of challenge and unfavourable position in social hierarchies and networks. Overall, biological markers of risk among the elderly are similar in Taiwan and the United States.

Sterilization failure, sterilization reversal, and pregnancy after sterilization reversal in Quebec.

Objective: 1). To determine the likelihood of sterilization reversal and of subsequent sterilization after sterilization reversal among men and women and 2). to examine the likelihood of pregnancy after sterilization (contraceptive failure) and of pregnancy after sterilization reversal.