One-year prevalence of psychiatric disorder in Ontarians 15 to 64 years of age

OBJECTIVE: To present the one-year prevalence of 14 psychiatric disorders in a community sample of Ontarians aged 15 to 64 years. METHOD: Data on psychiatric disorders were collected on 9953 respondents using the University of Michigan revision of the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (UM-CIDI). DSM-III-R criteria were used to define the psychiatric disorders. RESULTS: Almost 1 in 5 Ontarians (18.6%) had one or more of the disorders measured in the survey. Among 15-to 24-year-olds, 1 in 4 was affected. The distribution of individual disorders varied by sex and age. CONCLUSION: Because of the immense burden of suffering associated with psychiatric disorders, clinical and research efforts in this area should receive high priority within the health budget.     

Passive smoking in children up to 5 years of age

Passive smoking is a major health risk in young children. We investigated the percentage of children with mothers and/or fathers who reported regular smoking. Data are the national and regional health surveys of the German Cardiovascular Prevention Study (GCP) conducted from 1984 to 1992 in West Germany. 2538 mothers aged 25-40 years were included. The prevalence of passive smoking in children due to smoking mothers was 33.6% 55.4% of the children up to 5 years lived in households with at least one smoking parent member. In 23.4% of these households both parents were smokers. If only one member of the parents smoked this was in two out of three cases the father. 28.2% of mothers with a child younger than one year were current smokers. This prevalence rate increased with the age of the youngest child up to 35.6% for mothers, whose youngest child was 5 years old. Multiple logistic regression analysis was performed to investigate the association between smoking behaviour and the following variables: mother's age, social class, family status, community size and year of the survey. It was found that lower social class members, unmarried or divorced mothers and inhabitants of large cities reported significantly more often regular current smoking. These results underscore the importance of special intervention programs to reduce smoking in parents with young children.     

Structural analysis of memory traces in children from 4 to 10 years of age.

In 2 experiments, items from 4 (or 8) semantic categories were presented in 4 (or 8) colors located at 4 (or 8) spatial positions. In a recall task, a total of 48 4-, 7-, and 10-yr-olds were given semantic, color, and locational cues. The probability of successful cued recall to each type of cue and cue combination was used to estimate the proportion of memory traces that contained the various types of information. Although recall increased with age, the relative effectiveness of the 3 types of cues did not, and the estimated proportion of memory traces for the set of items that contained semantic information was higher than the estimated proportion having color and locational information. Retention of one type of cue information was not independent of retention of other types of cue information; Ss of all ages tended to retain either none or more than 1 of the 3 kinds of information. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Peritoneal dialysis in children under 5 years of age

The aim of this study was to examine the effect of intensive practice in table tennis on perceptual coincident timing. The main question was whether the perceptual demands encountered in fast ball sports produce modifications of the perceptual visual system. Expert table tennis players and novices were compared in a perceptual task which consisted of estimating, by pressing a key, the arrival of a moving stimulus at a target. The stimulus, which was presented either at constant velocity or at constant deceleration, reproduced as closely as possible the natural visual demands encountered in table tennis. The difference between the time of response and the time of arrival of the stimulus at a target position was measured over 40 trials for each of the 16 participants. The results showed no effect of expertise under the constant-velocity condition but an effect under the decelerative condition, indicating that experts were less trajectory-dependent than novices. This result was interpreted as reflecting a better adaptation of the perceptual system of experts to the constraints encountered during table tennis and specifically to the perceptual demands resulting from varied and decelerated ball trajectories. Finally, some limitations of the coincidence anticipation procedure are highlighted, concerning its use in practical settings for evaluating athletes or detecting sport talents, and the need for the simulation conditions during testing to reproduce as closely as possible the perceptual demands of real life is discussed.     

30 years later: children attending a counseling service up to 3 years of age

From 1953 through 1955 a total of 2364 individuals between o and 18 years were discharged from the Stockholm Child Guidance Clinics. Among these patients 125 (68 boys, 57 girls) were under the age of 3 years. A follow-up study was conducted 30 years later on this sample using records from psychiatric clinics and data from official registers of problematic behaviours. The majority of the infants when seen at the Child Guidance Clinics were judged to be mentally healthy or to have shown mild environmental reactions. However sixty per cent of these patients were identified in at least one of the registers during the follow-up period. Thus the initial evaluation was not prognostic of the future development. Boys developed mainly social maladjustment, whereas girls more often applied for psychiatric care during the follow-up. Significant prognostic factors in the 1950s were gender and parental psychiatric diagnosis.     

Phobic children one and two years posttreatment.

Evaluated progress of 62 phobic children 1 and 2 yrs after termination of treatment or waiting period. 80% were either symptom free or significantly improved; only 7% still had a severe phobia. Successfully treated Ss tended to remain symptom free and to be free from other deviant behaviors as well. 60% of the failures at termination continued to receive treatment and most were symptom free 2 yrs later. After 2 yrs, the effects of the original psychotherapy and reciprocal inhibition therapy no longer were related to outcome. However, age, status at the end of treatment, and time were related to outcome. Results are discussed in terms of the nature of child phobia and implications for research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effectiveness of VA-MENGOC-BC in children from 0 to 5 years of age in Cuba. First year of observation

The effectiveness or post-license efficacy of the BC antimeningococcal vaccine (VA-MENGOC-BC) was assessed 1 year after the end of the immunization campaign in children aged 0 to 5 years. Occurrence of the disease before and after intervention is described and effectiveness is estimated following the recommendations described by Orenstein et al. We used 2 case definitions to compare results in groups formed following different criteria, according to the employed diagnostic tests. Two formulas are used to assess efficacy: one, estimating the rates among vaccinated and non-vaccinated; and the other one, estimating the ratio of cases per vaccinated population. The increase of the relative annual decrease of the incidence occurring since 1985--a decrease of 10% or less--which in 1990 reached 34.6% should be stressed; the ratio of new cases prevented by the intervention was higher than 75%. Effectiveness or post-license efficacy was close to 90%, independently from the case definition variant or formula employed.     

Hindsight bias from 3 to 95 years of age.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 37(3) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (see record 2011-08992-005). On page 381, the notation in Figure 1 is incorrect. The corrected notations are discussed in the correction.] Upon learning the outcome to a problem, people tend to believe that they knew it all along (hindsight bias). Here, we report the first study to trace the development of hindsight bias across the life span. One hundred ninety-four participants aged 3 to 95 years completed 3 tasks designed to measure visual and verbal hindsight bias. All age groups demonstrated hindsight bias on all 3 tasks; however, preschoolers and older adults exhibited more bias than older children and younger adults. Multinomial processing tree analyses of these data revealed that preschoolers' enhanced hindsight bias resulted from them substituting the correct answer for their original answer in their recall (a qualitative error). Conversely, older adults' enhanced hindsight bias resulted from them forgetting their original answer and recalling an answer closer to, but not equal to, the correct answer (a quantitative error). We discuss these findings in relation to mechanisms of memory, perspective taking, theory of mind, and executive function. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Risk factors of persistent diarrhoea in children below five years of age

Persistent diarrhoea has been identified as a major source of morbidity in the developing world. This study was conducted to evaluate the risk factors of persistent diarrhoea in children below five years of age. The data used is from a prospective analytical case control study carried out in the Department of Paediatrics, Dow Medical College and Civil Hospital, Karachi, during 1993-94. A total of 50 cases of persistent diarrhoea and 50 acute diarrhoeal controls (matched for age and sex) under 5 comprised the study subjects in this analysis. The maximum incidence of persistent diarrhoeal episodes occurred in children below one year of age. Male to female ratio was 3:2. The seasonal variation showed a peak incidence in summer rainy season. Risk factors for persistent diarrhoea recorded were young age, poor nutritional status, irrational use of antibiotics during acute diarrhoea, lack of exclusive breast feeding, incomplete vaccination, lack of tap water supply and sanitation facility at home and income < Rupees 2000/month of the earning members of the family. Thus, it is concluded that discouraging the irrational use of antibiotics and other drugs for the treatment of diarrhoea, promotion of breast feeding and Expanded Programme of Immunization (EPI), Standard Diarrhoea Case Management courses for doctors, medical students and paramedical staff and provision of safe drinking water and sanitation facility are important for the prevention of persistent diarrhoea.     

Neuro-psychological development of vision in children older than 6 years of age

In snails maintained at 20 degrees C rediae of Fasciola hepatica merge from sporocysts from 11 days after infection onwards. The number of mother rediae rises steadily thereafter until at least 40 days after infection. Daughter rediae are seldom observed in mother rediae dissected from snails maintained at 20 degrees C. Their production can, however, be stimulated by subjecting the snail host to starvation, to low, and to high temperature shocks. The parasite is susceptible to stress from immediately after infection for about 16 days, when maintained at 20 degrees C. In general, the more extreme the shock, the greater is daughter redial production. Increasing the length of the period of stress from 12 h up to 9 days does not increase the production of daughter rediae, nor does repeated on/off cold shocks or continuous maintenance at 10 degrees C. Daughter rediae develop more rapidly than cercariae and leave the mother rediae several days earlier. There is no evidence that presence of daughter rediae coincides with the suppression of cercarial production. The findings are discussed with reference to possible mechanisms by which parasite development might be controlled.     

Posttraumatic stress disorder in children: a review of the past 10 years

OBJECTIVE: To review current knowledge about the clinical presentation, assessment, and treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children. METHOD: The literature on PTSD in children is examined. RESULTS: Over the past 10 years, PTSD has been described in children exposed to a variety of traumatic experiences. Little is known about the epidemiology of the disorder in children. Partial symptomatology and comorbidity are common. A variety of factors influence response to trauma and affect recovery. They include characteristics of the stressor and exposure to it; individual factors such as gender, age and developmental level, and psychiatric history; family characteristics; and cultural factors. Since the condition is likely to occur after disaster situations, much of the literature describes the child's response to disaster and interventions tend to include efforts within schools and/or communities. A number of clinical approaches have been used to treat the condition. CONCLUSIONS: While assessment has been studied extensively, the longitudinal course of PTSD and treatment effectiveness have not been. Biological correlates of the condition also warrant greater attention.     

Prevalence of coronary heart disease risk factors in active children, 7 to 12 years of age

Approximately 50% of the hind legs of cats infected with Brugia malayi and insulted with a beta haemolytic streptococcus became elephantoid in appearance after four to six weeks. This condition was found to be reversible. Collateral lymphatic vessels were seen by lymphography in most of the Brugia-streptococcus-infected legs. The popliteal draining systems in two of three cats, which harboured no worms, appeared normal by lymphography at 18 weeks.