Diabetes care: provider disparities in the US Appalachian region.

Introduction: Diabetes is a devastating and growing problem in the USA and throughout the world. Parts of Appalachia, especially the most rural and economically 'distressed' areas of the region, have disproportionately high levels of diabetes incidence and have had long-standing problems in healthcare access.

Purpose: Little is known about the status of public health infrastructures and expertise available to address the diabetes epidemic, whether in Appalachia or elsewhere.

Sex differences in young adulthood metabolic syndrome and physical activity: the Fels longitudinal study.

Objective: To evaluate the effects of habitual physical activity (PA) on the metabolic syndrome (MS) in young adult men and women.

Research Methods And Procedures: Cross-sectional PA data were utilized from 249 women and 237 men, aged 18-40 years in the Fels Longitudinal Study. MS components--abdominal circumference (AC), triglycerides (TG), HDL, blood pressure (BP), and fasting glucose (FG)--were dichotomized according to the National Cholesterol Education Program's Adult Treatment Panel III revised criteria.

Validity of a new automated software program for visceral adipose tissue estimation.

Introduction: Given the considerable time and research cost of analyzing biomedical images to quantify adipose tissue volumes, automated image analysis methods are highly desirable. Hippo Fat is a new software program designed to automatically quantify adipose tissue areas from magnetic resonance images without user inputs. Hippo Fat has yet to be independently validated against commonly used image analysis software programs.

Lipids, lipoproteins, lifestyle, adiposity and fat-free mass during middle age: the Fels Longitudinal Study.

Introduction: Although lipid profiles tend to worsen with age, it is not fully known if such age-related changes are influenced primarily by body composition and lifestyle or by other aspects of aging.

Objective: We investigated the extent to which the fat and fat-free components of body mass index (BMI) and lifestyle factors influence patterns of change in lipids independent of age.

Design: Serial data were analyzed using sex-specific longitudinal models.

Early menarche and the development of cardiovascular disease risk factors in adolescent girls: the Fels Longitudinal Study.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of menarcheal age on changes in insulin, glucose, lipids, and blood pressure during adolescence and to assess whether body composition modifies this relationship. We examined 391 girls, a subset of Fels Longitudinal Study female participants (8-21 yr of age). Self-reported menarcheal age was classified based on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III distribution, in which early menarche was at the 25th percentile or less (11.