Articles: health.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Trial of high-dose Edmonston-Zagreb measles vaccine in Guinea-Bissau: protective efficacy.
In a randomised study of 558 children in an urban African community, the protective effect of the Edmonston-Zagreb (EZ) measles vaccine given in a dose of 40,000 plaque forming units from the age of 4 months was compared with the effects of a standard dose (6000 tissue culture infectious units) of Schwarz measles vaccine given from the age of 9 months. During two years of follow-up, all 14 clinical cases of measles occurred in the Schwarz group; 10 of the children contracted measles before vaccination and 4 after measles vaccination. Thus the EZ vaccine provided significant protection against measles both before and after the usual age of vaccination. Among the children who were exposed to measles at home, those given EZ vaccine were better protected than either unvaccinated children or those given the Schwarz vaccine.
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Maternal weight gain is one of the most important independent predictors of infant birth weight and interacts with other maternal characteristics, including age, so that infant birth weight reaches a plateau at a higher level of maternal weight gain for young adolescents than for adults. It has been suggested that encouraging young adolescents to gain larger amounts of weight during pregnancy may be one way to decrease their risk of low-birth-weight deliveries. This recommendation may be premature because the mechanisms underlying the interaction between maternal age and weight gain are incompletely understood and may include such diverse factors as incomplete maternal growth, reproductive immaturity, diminished maternal body size, nutritional deficiencies, socioeconomic and behavioral factors, and maternal emotional stress. This review summarizes the literature on adolescent maternal weight gain and infant birth weight and discusses the importance of considering a multifactorial model in reformulating the weight-gain recommendations for pregnant adolescents.