Attitudes to weight and weight management in the early teenage years : A qualitative study of parental perceptions and views

© 2014 The Authors. Health Expectations Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Background: As most young teenagers grow up in families, parents might be well situated to facilitate and support their weight management and thereby prevent or manage obesity prior to adulthood. Aim: This paper explores parents’ perceptions of, and views about, their teenage children’s weight and the factors that influence parents’ weight management strategies. Design, setting and participants: We conducted two qualitative studies in Scotland, UK, involving in-depth interviews with the parents of overweight/obese and ‘normal’ weight 13-15 year olds (n=69). Findings: Parents’ concerns about their own weight provided useful context for understanding their attitudes or actions with regards to their teenage child. Some parents described their teenager’s weight as being of concern to them, although puberty often introduced confusion about a child’s weight status. Genetic explanations were very often put forward as a way of making sense of teenage weight or body size. Frustration about advising teenagers about weight management was expressed and some parents worried about giving their growing child a ‘problem’ if they directly raised concerns about weight with them. Discussion: Parents’ views about their own weight as well as social and moral norms about labelling a teenager as overweight or as needing help with their weight could usefully inform patient-centred service development. Parent/teenage partnerships and supporting parents to create a healthy home in which teenagers can make healthier choices are suggestions for intervention development. Conclusion: The study highlights the importance of taking parents’ perceptions into account when developing family-based interventions to address teenage overweight and obesity.Peer reviewe

Adaptation of a Freon-12 critical heat flux correlation to correlate water data from uniformly heated vertical tubes, Part I - based on critical heat flux data for water at pressures of 3 to 14 MPa.

Comparisons have been made between experimental critical heat flux (CHF) data for upflow of water in uniformly heated vertical tubes and values calculated from an empirical CHF correlation developed from Freon-12 data. When this correlation is re-evaluated to account for vapour Prandtl number effects very good agreement is obtained between experimental data and calculated values over a wide range of coolant conditions. Comparison of values calculated from the revised correlation with 2063 sets of CHF data obtained from experiments with water in vertical uniformly heated tubes shows a mean ratio of the calculated to experimental CHF of 0.82 and an r.m.s. error of 5.8 per cent for the following coolant conditions: (1) local pressure of 3.4 to 12 MPa; (2) mass flux greater than approx. 300 kg s-1m - 2 and (3) thermal equilibrium value of exit quality greater than 0.1

Investigation of critical heat fluxes in vertical tubes internally cooled by Freon-12, Part II - the development of a critical heat flux correlation for uniformly heated tubes.

Based on the parameter groups derived from a dimensional analysis a correlation for predicting critical heat fluxes (CHF) in a uniformly heated tube cooled internally by Freon-12 has been developed by systematically examining experimental data to establish the interrelationship of these dimensionless groups. Although the basic correlation agrees with much experimental data it is inaccurate for short tubes or low mass fluxes. To compensate for these effects corrective terms were introduced to provide a more generalised form. The correlation has been tested against approximately 2000 experimental data. It was found that apart from data at low exit qualities (less than 0.1) or short boiling lengths less than approximately 50 the correlation agrees with the data to within +- 10 per cent for boiling length ratios less than approximately 150; for values greater than 150 more than 90 per cent of points agree with the correlation to within +- 5 per cent

Adaptation of a Freon-12 CHF correlation to apply for water in uniformly heated vertical tubes, Part 2 - based on CHF data for water pressures in the range 6-20 MPa.

An examination of more than 5000 sets of experimental data for critical heat flux (CHF) in uniformly heated vertical tubes internally cooled by high pressure water has shown that the CHF correlation proposed in Part 1 of this work is accurate for water at pressures up to approximately 17 MPa provided that minor modifications are made to the Prandtl number index and the saturation boiling length function. For pressures greater than 17 MPa CHF values calculated from the correlation are increasingly lower than the experimental data particularly at low saturation boiling length ratios (<100). This deficiency results from the significance of the surface tension number in the correlation and the accuracy to which the values of surface tension and latent heat are known as they approach zero at the critical pressure. As in the previous work data have been excluded in which either the mass flux is less than 300 kg s -1m -2 or thermal equilibrium exit qualities are less than 0.1

THETRAN - a two-dimensional heat transport code for analysis of power transients.

A computer code THETRAN has been developed for two-dimensional analysis of heat transfer transients by utilising parts of two available transient heat transfer codes THETA1-B and HEATRAN. Combination of the one-dimensional coolant energy and heat transfer equations used in THETA1-B with the two-dimensional transient thermal diffusion code HEATRAN was achieved by matching two parameters (surface temperature and heat flux) at the solid/fluid interface. The resultant code is capable of analysing the transient thermal performance of a tube or duct internally or externally cooled by a flow of liquid coolant which may boil. The code was developed to analyse experimental conditions in which an electrically heated tube is subjected to a rapid change in power input while heat is removed by an internal flow of coolant at a constant mass flowrate

Investigation of critical heat fluxes in vertical tubes internally cooled by Freon-12, Part I - critical heat flux experiments with axially uniform and non-uniform heating and comparisons of data with selected correlations.

Experiments have been performed using vertical heated tubes cooled internally by Freon-12 to determine critical heat fluxes (CHFs) for both a uniformly heated section and an exit region with a separately controlled power supply. Heated lengths of the main separately were 2870 mm (8.48 and 16.76 mm tube bores) and 3700 mm (for 21.34 mm tube bore); heated length of the exit section was 230 mm. Coolant pressures exit qualities and mass fluxes were in the range 0.9 to 1.3 MPa 0.19 to 0.86 and 380 to 2800 kg m -2 -1 respectively. The data have been compared with published empirical correlations specifically formulated to predict CHFs in Freon-cooled vertical tubes; relevant published CHF data have also been compared with these correlations. These comparisons show that even over the ranges of conditions for which the correlations were developed predicted values are only accurate to within +-20 per cent. Moreover as mass fluxes increase above 3500 kg m - 2 -1 the modified Groeneveld correlation becomes increasingly inadequate and the Bertoletti and modified Bertoletti correlations under-predict CHF values by increasing amounts. At mass fluxes below 750 kg m - 2 -1 the Bertoletti correlations exhibit increasing inaccuracy with a decrease in mass flux. For non-uniform heating the correlations are at variance with the experimental data

Excess length of stay and mortality due to Clostridium difficile infection: a multi-state modelling approach.

BACKGROUND: The burden of healthcare-associated infections, such as healthcare-acquired Clostridium difficile (HA-CDI), can be expressed in terms of additional length of stay (LOS) and mortality. However, previous estimates have varied widely. Although some have considered time of infection onset (time-dependent bias), none considered the impact of severity of HA-CDI; this was the primary aim of this study. METHODS: The daily risk of in-hospital death or discharge was modelled using a Cox proportional hazards model, fitted to data on patients discharged in 2012 from a large English teaching hospital. We treated HA-CDI status as a time-dependent variable and adjusted for confounders. In addition, a multi-state model was developed to provide a clinically intuitive metric of delayed discharge associated with non-severe and severe HA-CDI respectively. FINDINGS: Data comprised 157 (including 48 severe) HA-CDI cases among 42,618 patients. HA-CDI reduced the daily discharge rate by nearly one-quarter [hazard ratio (HR): 0.72; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.61-0.84] and increased the in-hospital death rate by 75% compared with non-HA-CDI patients (HR: 1.75; 95% CI: 1.16-2.62). Whereas overall HA-CDI resulted in a mean excess LOS of about seven days (95% CI: 3.5-10.9), severe cases had an average excess LOS which was twice (∼11.6 days; 95% CI: 3.6-19.6) that of the non-severe cases (about five days; 95% CI: 1.1-9.5). CONCLUSION: HA-CDI contributes to patients' expected LOS and risk of mortality. However, when quantifying the health and economic burden of hospital-onset of HA-CDI, the heterogeneity in the impact of HA-CDI should be accounted for

Early warning system based on data mining to identify crime patterns

The analysis of criminal information is critical for the purpose of preventing the occurrence of offenses, so the crime records committed in the past are analyzed including perpetrators. The main objective was to identify crime patterns in the city of Bogota, Colombia, supported using Early Warning System based on data mining (CRISP-DM method). The research results show the identification of 12 different criminal profiles demonstrating that the Early Warning System is applicable since it managed to significantly reduce the time devoted to the processes of registering complaints and searching for criminal profiles.Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, Universidad de la Costa, Corporación Universitaria Latinoamericana

Using fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) to diagnose steroid-responsive disease and guide asthma management in routine care

Acknowledgements We thank Robin Taylor for his informative thinking and publications on FeNO, which have helped to influence and direct the thinking of the authors. Funding Extraction of the real-life dataset was funded by Research in Real Life Limited, the analysis of the dataset and the writing of this manuscript were co-funded (50:50) by Research in Real Life Limited and Aerocrine.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Offspring sex ratio and gonadal irradiation in the British Childhood Cancer Survivor Study

We investigated offspring sex ratio among 6232 offspring born to 3218 survivors of childhood cancer in relation to therapeutic irradiation, and pooled our data with those from two other large-scale studies giving a total of 9685 offspring. Exposure to high-dose gonadal irradiation was not associated with a significant alteration in offspring sex ratio compared to low doses (men: P=0.58, women: P=0.66). There was also no evidence that the ratio varied with time since cancer diagnosis when comparing survivors treated with radiotherapy vs those without (men: P=0.51; women: P=0.46). This, the largest study to date, finds no evidence that exposure to radiation affects the offspring sex ratio among survivors of childhood cancer