Fertility transition in England and Wales: continuity and change

The focus of this paper is whether the transition from high to low fertility reveals continuity or discontinuity with the past. Our analyses of districts of England and Wales over time reveal an overall picture of continuity. Specifically, we show that (1) a substantial proportion of districts experienced pretransition variations in marital fertility that were so large that they are suggestive of deliberate fertility control; (2) the changes over time in the distributions of marital fertility levels and the relative importance of marital fertility levels to the determination of overall fertility levels were gradual and smooth; (3) the proportion of districts dominated by marital fertiliity variation, as opposed to nuptiality variation, increased gradually over time, and both marital fertility and nuptiality variations were present in all periods considered; and (4) there are important relationships between changes over time in marital fertility and socio-economic variables in periods both before and after the transition. The last conclusion is based on our estimated equations from the pooled cross-sectional, time-series data. Moreover, these estimated equations reveal relationships between changes in specific explanatory variables and changes in marital fertility that are very similar both before and after the onset of the transition

Old-age mortality in Israel: analysis of variation and change

This study analyses differentials in life expectancy and cause-specific death rates among the elderly Jewish population in Israel in the early 1970s and early 1980s. We find substantial inequality in old-age mortality levels across subpopulations in geographic units and show that this inequality increased between the two periods. Much of the variation in old-age mortality is explained by differences in economic and social status, ethnicity and religiosity. The importance of religiosity is of particular interest in the context of Israeli society

Discovery of microRNAs and other small RNAs in solid tumors

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are ∼22-nt long, non-coding RNAs that regulate gene silencing. It is known that many human miRNAs are deregulated in numerous types of tumors. Here we report the sequencing of small RNAs (17–25 nt) from 23 breast, bladder, colon and lung tumor samples using high throughput sequencing. We identified 49 novel miRNA and miR-sized small RNAs. We further validated the expression of 10 novel small RNAs in 31 different types of blood, normal and tumor tissue samples using two independent platforms, namely microarray and RT–PCR. Some of the novel sequences show a large difference in expression between tumor and tumor-adjacent tissues, between different tumor stages, or between different tumor types. We also report the identification of novel small RNA classes in human: highly expressed small RNA derived from Y-RNA and endogenous siRNA. Finally, we identified dozens of new miRNA sequence variants that demonstrate the existence of miRNA-related SNP or post-transcriptional modifications. Our work extends the current knowledge of the tumor small RNA transcriptome and provides novel candidates for molecular biomarkers and drug targets