Articles

Measuring and tracking obesity inequality in the United States: evidence from NHANES, 1971-2014

Because people care about their weight relative to peers and society, obesity inequality plays a role in explaining obesity incidence and the impacts of being obese on subjective well-being. While the increase...

Authors: Tae-Young Pak, Susana Ferreira and Gregory Colson

Erratum to: Estimation of country-specific and global prevalence of male circumcision

Authors: Brian J. Morris, Richard G. Wamai, Esther B. Henebeng, Aaron A. R. Tobian, Jeffrey D. Klausner, Joya Banerjee and Catherine A. Hankins

Social patterns and differentials in the fertility transition in the context of HIV/AIDS: evidence from population surveillance, rural South Africa, 1993 – 2013

Literature is limited on the effects of high prevalence HIV on fertility in the absence of treatment, and the effects of the introduction of sustained access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) on fertility. We su...

Authors: Brian Houle, Athena Pantazis, Chodziwadziwa Kabudula, Stephen Tollman and Samuel J. Clark

Multiple-bias analysis as a technique to address systematic error in measures of abortion-related mortality

The UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have brought heightened global attention to the measurement of maternal mortality. It is imperative that new and novel approa...

Authors: Caitlin Gerdts and Jennifer Ahern

Identifying potential differences in cause-of-death coding practices across Russian regions

Reliable and comparable data on causes of death are crucial for public health analysis, but the usefulness of these data can be markedly diminished when the approach to coding is not standardized across territ...

Authors: Inna Danilova, Vladimir M. Shkolnikov, Dmitri A. Jdanov, France Meslé and Jacques Vallin

Causes of death in Vanuatu

The population of the Pacific Melanesian country of Vanuatu was 234,000 at the 2009 census. Apart from subsistence activities, economic activity includes tourism and agriculture. Current completeness of vital ...

Authors: Karen Carter, Viran Tovu, Jeffrey Tila Langati, Michael Buttsworth, Lester Dingley, Andy Calo, Griffith Harrison, Chalapati Rao, Alan D. Lopez and Richard Taylor

A novel method for estimating distributions of body mass index

Understanding trends in the distribution of body mass index (BMI) is a critical aspect of monitoring the global overweight and obesity epidemic. Conventional population health metrics often only focus on estim...

Authors: Marie Ng, Patrick Liu, Blake Thomson and Christopher J. L. Murray

Methods of applying the 1994 case definition of chronic fatigue syndrome – impact on classification and observed illness characteristics

Multiple case definitions are in use to identify chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Even when using the same definition, methods used to apply definitional criteria may affect results. The Centers for Disease Con...

Authors: E. R. Unger, J.-M. S. Lin, H. Tian, B. M. Gurbaxani, R. S. Boneva and J. F. Jones

Estimation of country-specific and global prevalence of male circumcision

Male circumcision (MC) status and genital infection risk are interlinked and MC is now part of HIV prevention programs worldwide. Current MC prevalence is not known for all countries globally. Our aim was to p...

Authors: Brian J Morris, Richard G Wamai, Esther B Henebeng, Aaron AR Tobian, Jeffrey D Klausner, Joya Banerjee and Catherine A Hankins

Mortality and life expectancy in Kiribati based on analysis of reported deaths

Kiribati is an atoll country of 103,058 (2010 Census) situated in the central Pacific. Previous mortality estimates have been derived from demographic analyses of census data. This is the first mortality analy...

Authors: Karen L. Carter, Tibwataake Baiteke, Tiensi Teea, Teanibuaka Tabunga, Mantarae Itienang, Chalapati Rao, Alan D. Lopez and Richard Taylor

Drug poisoning deaths in the United States, 1999–2012: a statistical adjustment analysis

Drug poisoning mortality in the US has risen rapidly but the drugs involved are frequently unspecified on death certificates.

Authors: Christopher J. Ruhm

Salt intakes in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review and meta-regression

High sodium intake increases the risk of hypertension and cardiovascular diseases. For this reason the World Health Organization recommends a maximum intake of 2 g per day and a 30 % reduction in population so...

Authors: Oyinlola Oyebode, Samuel Oti, Yen-Fu Chen and Richard J. Lilford

Application of space-time disease clustering by administrative databases in Italy: Adverse Reproductive Outcomes (AROs) and residential exposure

The aims of this study were to estimate the existence of clusters of AROs in the municipalities of the Marches Region (Central Italy) after complaints from residents living near an abandoned landfill site.

Authors: Pamela Barbadoro, Massimo Agostini, Marcello M. D’Errico, Francesco Di Stanislao, Fabio Filippetti, Sara Giuliani and Emilia Prospero

Validity of silhouette showcards as a measure of body size and obesity in a population in the African region: A practical research tool for general-purpose surveys

The purpose of this study is to validate the Pulvers silhouette showcard as a measure of weight status in a population in the African region. This tool is particularly beneficial when scarce resources do not a...

Authors: Maryam Yepes, Barathi Viswanathan, Pascal Bovet and Jürgen Maurer

Small area synthetic estimates of smoking prevalence during pregnancy in England

Complete and accurate data on maternal smoking prevalence during pregnancy are not available at a local geographical scale in England. We employ a synthetic estimation approach to predict the expected prevalen...

Authors: Lisa Szatkowski, Samantha J. Fahy, Tim Coleman, Joanna Taylor, Liz Twigg, Graham Moon and Jo Leonardi-Bee

Population aging, macroeconomic changes, and global diabetes prevalence, 1990–2008

Diabetes is an important contributor to global morbidity and mortality. The contributions of population aging and macroeconomic changes to the growth in diabetes prevalence over the past 20 years are unclear.

Authors: Nikkil Sudharsanan, Mohammed K. Ali, Neil K. Mehta and K M Venkat Narayan

Rural-urban differentials in pregnancy-related mortality in Zambia: estimates using data collected in a census

The use of census data to measure maternal mortality is a recent phenomenon, implemented in settings with non-functional vital registration systems and driven by needs for trend data. The 2010 round of populat...

Authors: Richard Banda, Knut Fylkesnes and Ingvild Fossgard Sandøy

Estimating distributions of health state severity for the global burden of disease study

Many major causes of disability in the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study present with a range of severity, and for most causes finding population distributions of severity can be difficult due to issues of ...

Authors: Roy Burstein, Tom Fleming, Juanita Haagsma, Joshua A. Salomon, Theo Vos and Christopher JL. Murray

Smoking, smoking cessation, and 7-year mortality in a cohort of Thai adults

Smoking is a strong risk factor for mortality in both the developed and the developing world. However, there is still limited research to examine the impact of smoking cessation and mortality in middle-income ...

Authors: Jiaying Zhao, Cha-aim Pachanee, Vasoontara Yiengprugsawan, Sam-ang Seubsman and Adrian Sleigh

Projected growth of the adult congenital heart disease population in the United States to 2050: an integrative systems modeling approach

Mortality for children with congenital heart disease (CHD) has declined with improved surgical techniques and neonatal screening; however, as these patients live longer, accurate estimates of the prevalence of...

Authors: Catherine P. Benziger, Karen Stout, Elisa Zaragoza-Macias, Amelia Bertozzi-Villa and Abraham D. Flaxman

Measuring causes of death in populations: a new metric that corrects cause-specific mortality fractions for chance

Verbal autopsy is gaining increasing acceptance as a method for determining the underlying cause of death when the cause of death given on death certificates is unavailable or unreliable, and there are now a n...

Authors: Abraham D. Flaxman, Peter T. Serina, Bernardo Hernandez, Christopher J. L. Murray, Ian Riley and Alan D. Lopez

Validation of a new predictive risk model: measuring the impact of the major modifiable risks of death for patients and populations

Modifiable risks account for a large fraction of disease and death, but clinicians and patients lack tools to identify high risk populations or compare the possible benefit of different interventions.

Authors: Stephen S. Lim, Emily Carnahan, Eugene C. Nelson, Catherine W. Gillespie, Ali H. Mokdad, Christopher J. L. Murray and Elliott S. Fisher

The importance of regional availability of health care for old age survival - Findings from German reunification

This article investigates the importance of regional health care availability for old age survival. Using German reunification as a natural experiment, we show that spatial variation in health care in East Ger...

Authors: Tobias C. Vogt and James W. Vaupel

Estimating the current mean age of mothers at the birth of their first child from household surveys

Estimates of the period mean age at first birth are readily available for countries with accurate vital statistics (i.e., in much of the developed world). In contrast, in most developing countries vital statis...

Authors: John Bongaarts and Ann K. Blanc

The Population Health Model (POHEM): an overview of rationale, methods and applications

The POpulation HEalth Model (POHEM) is a health microsimulation model that was developed at Statistics Canada in the early 1990s. POHEM draws together rich multivariate data from a wide range of sources to sim...

Authors: Deirdre A. Hennessy, William M. Flanagan, Peter Tanuseputro, Carol Bennett, Meltem Tuna, Jacek Kopec, Michael C. Wolfson and Douglas G. Manuel

A method for reclassifying cause of death in cases categorized as “event of undetermined intent”

We present a method for reclassifying external causes of death categorized as “event of undetermined intent” (EUIs) into non-transport accidents, suicides, or homicides. In nations like Russia and the UK the a...

Authors: Evgeny Andreev, Vladimir M. Shkolnikov, William Alex Pridemore and Svetlana Yu. Nikitina

Mapping HIV prevalence using population and antenatal sentinel-based HIV surveys: a multi-stage approach

Sound public health policy on HIV/AIDS depends on accurate prevalence and incidence statistics for the epidemic at both local and national levels. However, HIV statistics derived from epidemiological extrapola...

Authors: Samuel Manda, Lieketseng Masenyetse, Bo Cai and Renate Meyer

Multiple causes of death analysis of chronic diseases: the example of diabetes

Identifying a single disease as the underlying cause of death (UCOD) is an oversimplification of the clinical-pathological process leading to death. The multiple causes of death (MCOD) approach examines any me...

Authors: Ugo Fedeli, Giacomo Zoppini, Carlo Alberto Goldoni, Francesco Avossa, Giuseppe Mastrangelo and Mario Saugo

High rates of homicide in a rural South African population (2000–2008): findings from a population-based cohort study

South Africa has continued to receive increasing attention due to unprecedented high levels of violence. Homicide-related violence accounts for a significant proportion of unnatural deaths and contributes sign...

Authors: George Otieno, Edmore Marinda, Till Bärnighausen and Frank Tanser

Quantifying demographic and socioeconomic transitions for computational epidemiology: an open-source modeling approach applied to India

Demographic and socioeconomic changes such as increasing urbanization, migration, and female education shape population health in many low- and middle-income countries. These changes are rarely reflected in co...

Authors: Sanjay Basu and Jeremy D. Goldhaber-Fiebert

The longitudinal age and birth cohort trends of regular exercise among adults aged 16–63 years in Sweden: a 24-year follow-up study

The aim of this study is to analyze longitudinally, based on four measurements at intervals of eight years, the annual effect of age group and birth cohort on regular exercise in the Swedish population from 19...

Authors: Matti Leijon, Patrik Midlöv, Jan Sundquist, Kristina Sundquist and Sven-Erik Johansson

Ambient air pollution and adverse birth outcomes: a natural experiment study

Radical regulations to improve air quality, including traffic control, were implemented prior to and during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Consequently, ambient concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) and parti...

Authors: Cheng Huang, Catherine Nichols, Yang Liu, Yunping Zhang, Xiaohong Liu, Suhong Gao, Zhiwen Li and Aiguo Ren

Propensity score weighting for addressing under-reporting in mortality surveillance: a proof-of-concept study using the nationally representative mortality data in China

National mortality data are obtained routinely by the Disease Surveillance Points system (DSPs) in China and under-reporting is a big challenge in mortality surveillance.

Authors: Kang Guo, Peng Yin, Lijun Wang, Yibing Ji, Qingfeng Li, David Bishai, Shiwei Liu, Yunning Liu, Thomas Astell-Burt, Xiaoqi Feng, Jinling You, Jiangmei Liu and Maigeng Zhou

How much might a society spend on life-saving interventions at different ages while remaining cost-effective? A case study in a country with detailed data

We aimed to estimate the maximum intervention cost (EMIC) a society could invest in a life-saving intervention at different ages while remaining cost-effective according to a user-specified cost-effectiveness ...

Authors: Giorgi Kvizhinadze, Nick Wilson, Nisha Nair, Melissa McLeod and Tony Blakely

Level of agreement between patient-reported EQ-5D responses and EQ-5D responses mapped from the SF-12 in an injury population

Comparing health-related quality of life (HRQL) outcomes between studies is difficult due to the wide variety of instruments used. Comparing study outcomes and facilitating pooled data analyses requires valid ...

Authors: Belinda J Gabbe, Emma McDermott, Pam M Simpson, Sarah Derrett, Shanthi Ameratunga, Suzanne Polinder, Ronan A Lyons, Frederick P Rivara and James E Harrison

Should additional domains be added to the EQ-5D health-related quality of life instrument for community-based studies? An analytical descriptive study

There is increasing interest in monitoring the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of populations as opposed to clinical populations. The EQ-5D identifies five domains as being most able to capture the HRQo...

Authors: Jennifer Jelsma and Soraya Maart

Modeling contextual effects using individual-level data and without aggregation: an illustration of multilevel factor analysis (MLFA) with collective efficacy

Population health scientists increasingly study how contextual-level attributes affect individual health. A major challenge in this domain relates to measurement, i.e., how best to measure and create variables...

Authors: Erin C Dunn, Katherine E Masyn, William R Johnston and SV Subramanian

The County Health Rankings: rationale and methods

Annually since 2010, the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have produced the County Health Rankings—a “population health checkup” for the nation’s over 3,0...

Authors: Patrick L Remington, Bridget B Catlin and Keith P Gennuso

Assessing disability weights based on the responses of 30,660 people from four European countries

In calculations of burden of disease using disability-adjusted life years, disability weights are needed to quantify health losses relating to non-fatal outcomes, expressed as years lived with disability. In 2...

Authors: Juanita A Haagsma, Charline Maertens de Noordhout, Suzanne Polinder, Theo Vos, Arie H Havelaar, Alessandro Cassini, Brecht Devleesschauwer, Mirjam E Kretzschmar, Niko Speybroeck and Joshua A Salomon

Effects of a health information system data quality intervention on concordance in Mozambique: time-series analyses from 2009–2012

We assessed the effects of a three-year national-level, ministry-led health information system (HIS) data quality intervention and identified associated health facility factors.

Authors: Bradley H Wagenaar, Sarah Gimbel, Roxanne Hoek, James Pfeiffer, Cathy Michel, João Luis Manuel, Fatima Cuembelo, Titos Quembo, Pires Afonso, Victoria Porthé, Stephen Gloyd and Kenneth Sherr

Erosion of the healthy soldier effect in veterans of US military service in Iraq and Afghanistan

This research explores the healthy soldier effect (HSE) – a lower mortality risk among veterans relative to the general population—in United States (US) veterans deployed in support of operations in Iraq and A...

Authors: Mary J Bollinger, Susanne Schmidt, Jacqueline A Pugh, Helen M Parsons, Laurel A Copeland and Mary Jo Pugh

Multiple biomarker models for improved risk estimation of specific cardiovascular diseases related to metabolic syndrome: a cross-sectional study

Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is the co-occurrence of several conditions that increase risk of chronic disease and mortality. Multivariate models for calculating risk of MetS-related diseases based on combinations...

Authors: Evan Coffman and Jennifer Richmond-Bryant

Family structure and multiple domains of child well-being in the United States: a cross-sectional study

We examine the association between family structure and children’s health care utilization, barriers to health care access, health, and schooling and cognitive outcomes and assess whether socioeconomic status ...

Authors: Patrick M Krueger, Douglas P Jutte, Luisa Franzini, Irma Elo and Mark D Hayward

Improving the estimation of the burden of risk factors: an illustrative comparison of methods to measure smoking-attributable mortality

Prevention efforts are informed by the numbers of deaths or cases of disease caused by specific risk factors, but these are challenging to estimate in a population. Fortunately, an increasing number of jurisdi...

Authors: Peter Tanuseputro, Richard Perez, Laura Rosella, Kumanan Wilson, Carol Bennett, Meltem Tuna, Deirdre Hennessy, Heather Manson and Douglas Manuel

Health-related quality of life after TBI: a systematic review of study design, instruments, measurement properties, and outcome

Measurement of health-related quality of life (HRQL) is essential to quantify the subjective burden of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in survivors. We performed a systematic review of HRQL studies in TBI to eval...

Authors: Suzanne Polinder, Juanita A Haagsma, David van Klaveren, Ewout W Steyerberg and Ed F van Beeck

Salud Mesoamérica 2015 Initiative: design, implementation, and baseline findings

Health has improved markedly in Mesoamerica, the region consisting of southern Mexico and Central America, over the past decade. Despite this progress, there remain substantial inequalities in health outcomes,...

Authors: Ali H Mokdad, Katherine Ellicott Colson, Paola Zúñiga-Brenes, Diego Ríos-Zertuche, Erin B Palmisano, Eyleen Alfaro-Porras, Brent W Anderson, Marco Borgo, Sima Desai, Marielle C Gagnier, Catherine W Gillespie, Sandra L Giron, Annie Haakenstad, Sonia López Romero, Julio Mateus, Abigail McKay…

Mapping malaria risk and vulnerability in the United Republic of Tanzania: a spatial explicit model

Outbreaks of vector-borne diseases (VBDs) impose a heavy burden on vulnerable populations. Despite recent progress in eradication and control, malaria remains the most prevalent VBD. Integrative approaches tha...

Authors: Michael Hagenlocher and Marcia C Castro

Abdominal vs. overall obesity among women in a nutrition transition context: geographic and socio-economic patterns of abdominal-only obesity in Tunisia

Most assessments of the burden of obesity in nutrition transition contexts rely on body mass index (BMI) only, even though abdominal adiposity might be specifically predictive of adverse health outcomes. In Tu...

Authors: Pierre Traissac, Rebecca Pradeilles, Jalila El Ati, Hajer Aounallah-Skhiri, Sabrina Eymard-Duvernay, Agnès Gartner, Chiraz Béji, Souha Bougatef, Yves Martin-Prével, Patrick Kolsteren, Francis Delpeuch, Habiba Ben Romdhane and Bernard Maire

The increase in cancer prevalence and hospital burden in Western Australia, 1992–2011

To describe cancer prevalence and hospital service utilization by prevalent cancer patients in Western Australia from 1992 to 2011.

Authors: Susannah Maxwell, Peter O’Leary, Terry Slevin and Rachael Moorin

A methodological framework for the improved use of routine health system data to evaluate national malaria control programs: evidence from Zambia

Due to challenges in laboratory confirmation, reporting completeness, timeliness, and health access, routine incidence data from health management information systems (HMIS) have rarely been used for the rigor...

Authors: Adam Bennett, Joshua Yukich, John M Miller, Penelope Vounatsou, Busiku Hamainza, Mercy M Ingwe, Hawela B Moonga, Mulakwo Kamuliwo, Joseph Keating, Thomas A Smith, Richard W Steketee and Thomas P Eisele