Preventive medicine
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Preventive medicine · Dec 2013
Persistent smoking as a predictor of disability pension due to musculoskeletal diagnoses: a 23 year prospective study of Finnish twins.
To investigate whether stability or changes in smoking predict disability pension (DP) due to low back diagnoses (LBD) and musculoskeletal diagnoses (MSD) after taking familial confounding into account using a co-twin design. ⋯ Persistent smoking predicts early disability pension due to musculoskeletal diagnoses and low back diagnoses independently from numerous confounding factors, including familial effects shared by the co-twins.
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Preventive medicine · Dec 2013
Randomized Controlled TrialSchool-based mindfulness instruction for urban male youth: a small randomized controlled trial.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) has been shown to improve mental health and reduce stress in a variety of adult populations. Here, we explore the effects of a school-based MBSR program for young urban males. ⋯ In this study, MBSR participants showed less anxiety, improved coping, and a possible attenuation of cortisol response to academic stress, when compared with HT participants. These results suggest that MBSR improves psychological functioning among urban male youth.
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Preventive medicine · Dec 2013
Legislated changes to federal pension income in Canada will adversely affect low income seniors' health.
This study uses a population health intervention modeling approach to project the impact of recent legislated increases in age eligibility for Canadian federally-funded pension benefits on low income seniors' health, using food insecurity as a health indicator. ⋯ Raising the age of eligibility for public pension seniors' benefits in Canada from 65 to 67 years will negatively impact low income seniors' health, relegating those who are food insecure to continued hardship.
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According to current hierarchies of evidence for EBM, evidence of correlation (e.g., from RCTs) is always more important than evidence of mechanisms when evaluating and establishing causal claims. We argue that evidence of mechanisms needs to be treated alongside evidence of correlation. This is for three reasons. ⋯ Second, evidence of mechanisms is often required in order to obtain evidence of correlation (for example, in order to set up and evaluate RCTs). Third, evidence of mechanisms is often required in order to generalise and apply causal claims. While the EBM movement has been enormously successful in making explicit and critically examining one aspect of our evidential practice, i.e., evidence of correlation, we wish to extend this line of work to make explicit and critically examine a second aspect of our evidential practices: evidence of mechanisms.
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Preventive medicine · Dec 2013
Prevalence of metabolic syndrome and its influencing factors among the Chinese adults: the China Health and Nutrition Survey in 2009.
We aimed to estimate the up-to-date prevalence of metabolic syndrome (MS) and its influencing factors among the Chinese adults. ⋯ Our results suggest an urgent need to develop national strategies for the prevention, detection, treatment and control of obesity and MS in China.