In four Southern African countries where the HIV prevalence rate is among the highest in the world, 46% of female and 68% of male adolescents infected with HIV report having never engaged in sex. This finding indicates either the dominance of non-sexual modes of HIV transmission or systematic...

Motivating individuals to actively engage in physical activity due to its beneficial health effects has been an integral part of Scotland's health policy agenda. The current Scottish guidelines recommend individuals participate in physical activity of moderate vigor for 30 minutes at least five...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of prospective cohort (longitudinal) studies of alcohol marketing and adolescent drinking. The paper provides a narrative summary of 21 longitudinal studies, and 12 of these are selected for inclusion in the meta-analysis. Each study surveyed a sample of youth...

This article analyzes the evolution of education, health expenditure and economic development in 39 African countries for the period 2000-2005, which shows that the low levels of health expenditure in many Africa countries are far from evolving to the necessary speed to meet the social demand....

This paper proposes a novel two-stage approach to modeling health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL) outcomes. The approach allows a patient-centered interpretation by estimating regression coe fficients based on the multi-dimensional HRQoL profi le, but maintains the parsimony of the...

We show how spending different amount of time outdoors on weekends and weekdays changes the estimates of the impact of ground level ozone on respiratory diseases and Asthma. Our focus is on the short term effect of air pollution on public health. The American Time Use Survey data are used for...

The COVID-19 pandemic is characterized by a recurring sequence of peaks and troughs. This article proposes a regime-switching unobserved components (UC) approach to model the trend of COVID-19 infections as a function of this ebb and flow pattern. Estimated regime probabilities indicate the...

In this paper, we investigate whether social support exchanged in an online healthcare community benefits patients’ mental health. We propose an inhomogeneous Partially Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP) model to examine the latent health outcomes of online health community members. The...

Attention has been given recently to the Concentration Index; specifically, corrected versions have been generated that supersede the original with properties such as transform invariance, reversal invariance and transfer invariance. While previous studies have promoted a transformed or...

This study aims to analyse the impact of the measurement of health status on socioeconomic inequalities in health. A MIMIC model with structural equations is used to create a latent variable of health status from four health indicators: self-assessed health, report of chronic diseases, report of...