Archive for January, 2013

Cochrane meta-anaylisis about Diet & Cardiovascular Disease

A meta-analysis is a statistical method in which results of individual studies are mathematically combined in order to improve the reliability of the results. This technique presents enormous advantages over classical literature reviews. Meta-analyses also present weaknesses and they are fundamentally limited by the quality of the underlying studies. The Cochrane Collaboration is an international network that, using the meta-analysis method, analyzes randomized clinical trials (RCT) available on various subjects, and synthesizes them into regularly updated systematic reviews. ...More...

Estimation of Risk for Child or Adolescent Obesity at Birth

By analyzing data from 4,000 children born in Finland in 1986, researchers created a formula that accurately predicts the likelihood of a baby developing obesity during childhood. Importantly, the predictive accuracy of the models did not decline from childhood to adolescence, suggesting that the association between the traditional risk factors and obesity is stable until early adulthood. When the performance of genetics in predicting early obesity phenotypes was explored, with the largest list of obesity-SNPs ever used, it showed only a ...More...