Introduction: As malaria declines, low-density malaria infections (LMIs) represent an increasing proportion of infections and may have negative impacts on child health and cognition, necessitating development of targeted and effective solutions. This trial assesses the health, cognitive and socioeconomic impact of two strategies for detecting and treating LMI in a low transmission setting.
Methods And Analysis: The study is a 3-arm open-label individually randomised controlled trial enrolling 600 children aged 6 months to 10 years in Bagamoyo district, Tanzania.
High quality health data as collected by health management information systems (HMIS) is an important building block of national health systems. District Health Information System 2 (DHIS2) software is an innovation in data management and monitoring for strengthening HMIS that has been widely implemented in low and middle-income countries in the last decade. However, analysts and decision-makers still face significant challenges in fully utilizing the capabilities of DHIS2 data to pursue national and international health agendas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOver the past three decades, the Vietnamese Mekong Delta has experienced a significant increase in agricultural productivity, partly achieved through increased agrochemical use. To abate negative effects on human and environmental health, several national programs were launched to enhance safer pesticide use. This study aimed to assess the patterns and relationships of official sustainable agriculture educational programs, pesticide safety knowledge, and practices of smallholder farmers in the Mekong Delta.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFValidated outcome measures with the capacity to reflect meaningful change are key to assessing potential interventions for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We derive clinically meaningful change thresholds (MCTs) of the Autism Impact Measure (AIM) and identify factors associated with meaningful change. Baseline and 12-months follow-up survey of caregivers of 2,761 children with ASD aged 3-17 years from the U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: COVID-19 related distress has been shown to have negative associations with family well-being.
Objectives: To determine the immediate impact of acute COVID-19 infection on maternal well-being and parenting practices among Brazilian families.
Participants And Setting: We studied 2'579 mothers (29'913 observations) of young children from vulnerable neighborhoods in Boa Vista, Brazil over 12 months.
To better understand the impact of children's autism spectrum disorder (ASD) severity on families, we evaluated pathways through which ASD severity affected child sleep quality, caregiver strain, and caregiver sleep quality. In a cross-sectional analysis through the U.S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
August 2021
In rural settings of Côte d'Ivoire, access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) at schools is often lacking. The purpose of this study was to assess the availability, quality, and use of WASH infrastructure in schools in the south-central part of Côte d'Ivoire, and to determine the hygiene practices of schoolchildren. A cross-sectional study was conducted in 20 primary schools with (n = 10) or without (n = 10) direct access to drinking water.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNatural resource extraction projects are often accompanied by complex environmental and social-ecological changes. In this paper, we evaluated the association between commodity extraction and the incidence of diseases. We retrieved council (district)-level outpatient data from all public and private health facilities from the District Health Information System (DHIS2).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Access to improved water and sanitation infrastructures are key determinants of health. The sub-Saharan African region in particular is lagging behind the ambitious goal of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to ensure universal access to improved and reliable water and sanitation for all (Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6). Large mining projects can promote economic growth and hence investments in water and sanitation infrastructures, but at the same time lead to rapid population growth and environmental degradation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile a substantial amount of literature addresses the relationship between natural resources and economic growth, relatively little is known regarding the relationship between natural resource endowment and health at the population level. We construct a 5-year cross-country panel to assess the impact of natural resource rents on changes in life expectancy at birth as a proxy indicator for population health during the period 1970-2015. To estimate the causal effects of interest, we use global commodity prices as instrumental variables for natural resource rent incomes in two-stage-least squares regressions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Population-based data on educational and employment outcomes in adulthood among individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in childhood are currently limited.
Objective: To evaluate educational attainment and employment among individuals with and without a diagnosis of ASD before age 12 years in Denmark.
Design, Setting, And Participants: This nationwide cross-sectional prevalence study was conducted using data from Danish registers.
Background: Psychostimulants and atomoxetine have been shown to increase blood pressure, heart rate, and QT interval in children and adolescents; however, based on current literature, it is unclear if these "attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) medications" are also associated with serious cardiovascular (SCV) events. We addressed this question in commonly exposed groups of children and adolescents with either ADHD or autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Methods: Using commercial (years 2000-2016) and Medicaid (years 2012-2016) administrative claims data from the United States (US), we conducted two case-control studies, nested within respective cohorts of ADHD and ASD children aged 3-18 years.
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAsthma prevalence has increased in epidemic proportions with urbanization, but growing up on traditional farms offers protection even today. The asthma-protective effect of farms appears to be associated with rich home dust microbiota, which could be used to model a health-promoting indoor microbiome. Here we show by modeling differences in house dust microbiota composition between farm and non-farm homes of Finnish birth cohorts that in children who grow up in non-farm homes, asthma risk decreases as the similarity of their home bacterial microbiota composition to that of farm homes increases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe article Psychometric Validation of the Autism Impact Measure (AIM), written by Richard Houghton, Brigitta Monz, Kiely Law, Georg Loss, Stephanie Le Scouiller, Frank de Vries and Tom Willgoss was originally published electronically on the publisher's internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 09 April 2019 without open access.With the author(s)' decision to opt for Open Choice the copyright of the article changed on May 2019 to © The Author(s) 2019 and the article is forthwith distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Autism impact measure (AIM) is a caregiver-reported questionnaire assessing autism symptom frequency and impact in children, previously shown to have good test-retest reliability, convergent validity and structural validity. This study extended previous work by exploring the AIM's ability to discriminate between 'known-groups' of children, and estimating thresholds for clinically important responses. Data were collected online and electronically on computer and mobile devices; hence, it was also possible to confirm other psychometric properties of the AIM in this format.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChildren with autism receive different types of non-drug treatments. We aimed to describe caregiver-reported pattern of care and its variability by geography and healthcare coverage in a US-wide sample of children aged 3-17 years. We recruited caregivers from the Simons Foundation Powering Autism Research for Knowledge (SPARK) cohort.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Living on a farm has repeatedly been shown to protect children from asthma and allergies. A major factor involved in this effect is consumption of unprocessed cow's milk obtained directly from a farm. However, this phenomenon has never been shown in a longitudinal design, and the responsible milk components are still unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Respir Crit Care Med
April 2016
Rationale: Growing up on a farm protects from childhood asthma and early wheeze. Virus-triggered wheeze in infancy predicts asthma in individuals with a genetic asthma risk associated with chromosome 17q21.
Objectives: To test environmental determinants of infections and wheeze in the first year of life, potential modifications of these associations by 17q21, and the implications for different trajectories of wheeze.
Background: Breast-feeding is protective against respiratory infections in early life. Given the co-evolutionary adaptations of humans and cattle, bovine milk might exert similar anti-infective effects in human infants.
Objective: To study effects of consumption of raw and processed cow's milk on common infections in infants.