Studies and Analyses

A new study from the University of Glasgow that analyses information from over 2000 11 year old children and their parents (in 1984-5) reveals no evidence that number of parents in the household or family meals are associated with children’s diets, while maternal employment is associated with better diets.

The children involved in the study were part of the Medical Research Council’s West of Scotland 11 to 16 Study, a study of health and lifestyles, which has followed them since a

Children say the funniest things, but what makes them laugh? Do German and Israeli kids share the same sense of humour – or is the Simpsons the universal language of laughter?

That is the puzzle that a University of Ulster researcher is hoping to unravel as part of a five-nation probe into what makes children laugh.

Professor Máire Messenger-Davies, who is based at the University’s Coleraine campus, will join researchers from Germany, Israel, South Africa and the US in th

Use of such cholesterol-lowering drugs as statins may reduce the risk of advanced prostate cancer, according to research that followed 34,428 U.S. men for more than a decade.

The study, presented at the 96th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, found that men who used these medications had half the risk of advanced prostate cancer and a third of the risk of metastatic or fatal prostate cancer, compared to men who did not use cholesterol-lowering drugs. R

A study comparing, for the first time, breast cancers from Nigeria, Senegal and North America has found that women of African ancestry are more likely to be diagnosed with a more virulent form of the disease than women of European ancestry.

Researchers from the University of Chicago, working with colleagues at the University of Calabar in Nigeria and the University of North Carolina, found that breast cancers in African women produce a different pattern of gene expression. Tumor

Babies who gain weight rapidly during their very first week of life may be more likely to be overweight as young adults, according to a new study. The research suggests that the first week may be a critical period for setting lifelong patterns of body weight.

Researchers from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Iowa studied 653 adults, ranging in age from 20 to 32. The subjects, all of whom were white, had been measure

Diesel particle pollution inside urban school buses may be worse than levels found in the surrounding roadway air, according to a study by scientists at the University of California. The report appears in the April 15 issue of the American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science & Technology. ACS is the world’s largest scientific society.

It has generally been assumed that other vehicles on the road are the source of elevated particle levels. But a study of schoo