Background: Vaccine hesitancy is an urgent public health threat. While tools have been developed to monitor vaccine hesitancy among parents and the general adult population, no such tool exists for adolescents.
Methods: We modified an existing adult Vaccine Hesitancy Scale to create a teen COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Scale (tVHS-COVID) for adolescents and their parents.
Background: Although numerous studies support the safety of influenza vaccination during pregnancy, fewer studies have evaluated the risk of miscarriage or considered the effect of prior immunization.
Methods: Using national de-identified administrative claims data from the Optum Labs Data Warehouse, we conducted a claims-based cohort study of 117,626 pregnancies between January 2009 and December 2018. We identified pandemic A(H1N1)pdm09 and seasonal influenza vaccinations using CPT codes.
Purpose: This study aimed to examine longitudinal associations of workplace effort and reward with changes in cognitive function among United States workers.
Methods: Data from the national, population-based Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study with a 9-year follow-up were used. Validated workplace effort and reward scales were measured at baseline, and cognitive outcomes (including composite cognition, episodic memory, and executive functioning) were measured with the Brief Test of Adult Cognition by Telephone (BTACT) at baseline and follow-up.
This paper presents causal loop diagrams (CLDs) as tools for studying complex public health problems like health inequality. These problems often involve feedback loops-a characteristic of complex systems not fully integrated into mainstream epidemiology. CLDs are conceptual models that visualize connections between system variables.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Hypertension has been linked to socially patterned stressors, including discrimination. Few studies have quantified the risk of hypertension associated with exposure to perceived job discrimination.
Methods: We used prospective cohort data from the Sister Study (enrollment from 2003-2009) to estimate self-reported incident hypertension associated with perceived job discrimination based on race, gender, age, sexual orientation, or health status.
Background: Cannabis use before the COVID-19 pandemic for many involved sharing prepared cannabis for inhalation, practices that were less prevalent during the pandemic. State-level COVID-19 containment policies may have influenced this decrease. This study examined the extent to which the intensity of state-level COVID-19 policies were associated with individual-level cannabis sharing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The decline in global child mortality is an important public health achievement, yet child mortality remains disproportionally high in many low-income countries like Guinea-Bissau. The persisting high mortality rates necessitate targeted research to identify vulnerable subgroups of children and formulate effective interventions.
Objective: This study aimed to discover subgroups of children at an elevated risk of mortality in the urban setting of Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, West Africa.
Background: Childhood cancers are associated with high mortality and morbidity, and some maternal prescription drug use during pregnancy has been implicated in cancer risk. There are few studies on the effects of hypertension, preeclampsia, and the use of antihypertensives in pregnancy on children's cancer risks.
Objective: This population-based cohort study analyzed the relationship between hypertension, preeclampsia, and antihypertensives taken during pregnancy and the risks of childhood cancers in the offspring.
Background: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection during pregnancy increases the risk of adverse fetal and neonatal outcomes, but the contribution to severe maternal morbidity (SMM) has been less frequently documented.
Methods: We conducted a national cohort study of 93 624 deliveries occurring between 11 March 2020 and 1 July 2021 using medical claims information from the OptumLabs Data Warehouse. SARS-CoV-2 infection was identified from diagnostic and laboratory testing claims records.
Background: Pertussis is a contagious respiratory disease. Maternal tetanus-diphtheria-acellular pertussis vaccination during pregnancy has been recommended by the United States Centres for Disease Control (US CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for unvaccinated pregnant women since October 2011 to prevent infection among infants; in 2012, ACIP extended this recommendation to every pregnancy, regardless of previous vaccination status. The population-level effect of these recommendations on infant pertussis is unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPaediatr Perinat Epidemiol
February 2024
Background: Systematically recorded smoking data are not always available in vital statistics records, and even when available it can underestimate true smoking rates.
Objective: To develop a prediction model for maternal tobacco smoking in late pregnancy based on birth certificate information using a combination of self- or provider-reported smoking and biomarkers (smoking metabolites) in neonatal blood spots as the alloyed gold standard.
Methods: We designed a case-control study where childhood cancer cases were identified from the California Cancer Registry and controls were from the California birth rolls between 1983 and 2011 who were cancer-free by the age of six.
Background: When estimating the effect of time-varying exposures on longer-term outcomes, the assumption of conditional exchangeability or no uncontrolled confounding extends beyond baseline confounding to include time-varying confounding. We illustrate the structures and magnitude of uncontrolled time-varying confounding in exposure effect estimates obtained from g-computation when sequential conditional exchangeability is violated.
Methods: We used directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to depict time-varying uncontrolled confounding.
Background: Cannabis use before the COVID-19 pandemic for many involved sharing prepared cannabis for inhalation, practices that were less prevalent during the pandemic. State-level COVID-19 containment policies may have influenced this decrease. This study examined the extent to which the intensity of state-level COVID-19 policies were associated with individual-level cannabis sharing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBody mass index is a widely used but poor predictor of adiposity in populations with excessive fat-free mass. Rigorous predictive models validated specifically in a nationally representative sample of the US population and that could be used for calibration purposes are needed. The objective of this study was to develop and validate prediction equations of body fat percentage obtained from Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry using body mass index (BMI) and socio-demographics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Season of birth has been associated with age at menarche. Maternal vitamin D levels in pregnancy may explain this effect. We investigated whether the season of first trimester or maternal 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 [25(OH)D3] levels were associated with pubertal timing in children.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPublic health and the underlying disease processes are complex, often involving the interaction of biologic, social, psychologic, economic, and other processes that may be nonlinear and adaptive and have other features of complex systems. There is therefore a need to push the boundaries of public health beyond single-factor data analysis and expand the capacity of research methodology to tackle real-world complexities. This article sets out a way to operationalize complex systems thinking in public health, with a particular focus on how epidemiologic methods and data can contribute towards this end.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMaternal vitamin D levels during pregnancy may be important for reproductive health in male offspring by regulating cell proliferation and differentiation during development. We conducted a follow-up study of 827 young men from the Fetal Programming of Semen Quality (FEPOS) cohort, nested in the Danish National Birth Cohort to investigate if maternal vitamin D levels were associated with measures of reproductive health in adult sons. These included semen characteristics, testes volume, and reproductive hormone levels and were analysed according to maternal vitamin D (25(OH)D) levels during pregnancy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, cannabis use social practices often involved sharing prepared cannabis (joints/blunts/cigarettes) and cannabis-related paraphernalia. Previous studies have demonstrated that sharing paraphernalia for cannabis, tobacco, and crack cocaine is a risk factor for respiratory viral and bacterial infections. Although COVID-19 is a respiratory viral infection that spreads through droplets and airborne transmission, it is unclear if many individuals adopted harm reduction practices around sharing cannabis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: U.S. school closures due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic led to extended periods of remote learning and social and economic impact on families.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Adjusting for multiple biases usually involves adjusting for one bias at a time, with careful attention to the order in which these biases are adjusted. A novel, alternative approach to multiple-bias adjustment involves the simultaneous adjustment of all biases via imputation and/or regression weighting. The imputed value or weight corresponds to the probability of the missing data and serves to 'reconstruct' the unbiased data that would be observed based on the provided assumptions of the degree of bias.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Childhood cancer may be related to maternal health in pregnancy. Maternal anemia is a common condition in pregnancy, especially in low-income countries, but the association between maternal anemia and childhood cancer has not been widely studied.
Objective: To examine the potential relation between maternal anemia during pregnancy and childhood cancers in a population-based cohort study in Taiwan.
Objective: Examine prospective relationships between erectile dysfunction (ED) drugs EDand CD4 and CD8 T-cells, and immune markers among men who have sex with men (MSM).
Methods: Data from Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, an observational prospective cohort study, with semi-annual follow-ups conducted in four U.S.
Background: The effect of maternal diabetes on childhood cancer has not been widely studied.
Methods: We examined this in two population-based studies in Denmark (N = 6420 cancer cases, 160,484 controls) and Taiwan (N = 2160 cancer cases, 2,076,877 non-cases) using logistic regression and Cox proportional hazard regression adjusted for birth year, child's sex, maternal age and birth order.
Results: Gestational diabetes in Denmark [odds ratio (OR) = 0.
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