Young adult weight trajectories through midlife by body mass category.

Objective: To estimate the expected weight gain through midlife for those in a given BMI category in young adulthood.

Design And Methods: Group-based trajectory modeling and National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 data from 1990 to 2008 were used to quantify weight trajectories through midlife for 10,038 young adult men and women stratified by BMI category. Logistic regression was used to assess the association of trajectory membership with obesity-related conditions (hypertension, diabetes, arthritis) in middle age.

Expert estimates of caregiver hours for older Singaporeans with dementia.

Aim: To obtain experts' estimates of the number of non-medical care hours required by older Singaporeans at different stages of ageing-related dementia, with low or high behavioural features.

Methods: Experts on dementia in Singapore attended one of two meetings where they provided estimates of the number of care hours required for individuals at mild, moderate and severe levels of dementia with either low or high behavioural features. The experts were shown the collated responses, given an opportunity to discuss as a group, and then polled again.

Future living arrangements of Singaporeans with age-related dementia.

Background: With rapid aging, Singapore faces an increasing proportion of the population with age-related dementia. We used system dynamics methodology to estimate the number and proportion of people with mild, moderate, and severe dementia in future years and to examine the impact of changing family composition on their likely living arrangements.

Methods: A system dynamics model was constructed to estimate resident population, drawing birth and mortality rates from census data.

Chapter 5: assessing risk of bias as a domain of quality in medical test studies.

Assessing methodological quality is a necessary activity for any systematic review, including those evaluating the evidence for studies of medical test performance. Judging the overall quality of an individual study involves examining the size of the study, the direction and degree of findings, the relevance of the study, and the risk of bias in the form of systematic error, internal validity, and other study limitations. In this chapter of the Methods Guide for Medical Test Reviews, we focus on the evaluation of risk of bias in the form of systematic error in an individual study as a distinctly important component of quality in studies of medical test performance, specifically in the context of estimating test performance (sensitivity and specificity).