Pesticides and transgenerational inheritance of pathologies: Designing, analysing and reporting rodent studies.

Single-centre studies examining the transgenerational inheritance of pathologies in rodents exposed to pesticides have not always taken important design and analysis issues into account. This paper examines these methodological and statistical issues in detail. Its particular focus is on the estimation of 'litter effects': the tendency for rodents within a litter to be more alike than rodents in different litters.

Is adult education associated with reduced coronary heart disease risk?

Background: Although there is consistent evidence that higher levels of education are associated with better health and reduced disease risk, there is little evidence on whether this is true throughout the lifecourse. This study examines whether additional higher educational qualifications acquired later on in adulthood are associated with a reduction in coronary heart disease (CHD) risk over and above qualifications from earlier on in life.

Methods: The National Child Development Study 1958 British birth cohort was analysed, with data at birth, age 7 (1965), age 23 (1981), 42 (2000) and age 44 years (2002).

Accumulated labour market disadvantage and limiting long-term illness: data from the 1971-1991 Office for National Statistics' Longitudinal Study.

Background: Both social class and unemployment have been shown in many studies to be related to ill health. Recent work in social epidemiology has demonstrated the importance of examining the accumulation of disadvantage over the life course. This paper therefore uses a large longitudinal data set to examine the accumulation of both disadvantaged class and unemployment over a 20-year period in a representative sample of the male working population of England and Wales.