Risks and comorbid factors of frequent headaches during childhood and adolescence

Copyright: © 2017 Paiva T, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Background: The prevalence of headache during adolescence is very high. In most studies, the prevalence of headache is higher in females. The objective of the present study was to evaluate statistically significant associations between high headache frequency and multiple variables obtained in a National Survey. Methods: The included variables were demographic and socioeconomic; other health complaints; sleep characteristics and complaints; current adolescents´ habits concerning multimedia/electronic tools and nutrition variables; risk behaviors; social support and school satisfaction with the final purpose of building a risk association model for adolescents´ frequent headaches by means of a logistic regression. This survey is a component of the Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC) study. The Portuguese HBSC survey included 3476 pupils (53.8 % girls) in the 8th (45.9%) and 10th grades (54.1%) with a mean age was 14.9 years (SD=1.26). Results: The prevalence of high-frequency headaches was 22.2% and their major comorbidities were other health complaints with special reference to abdominal pain and dizziness and psychopathological symptoms, namely sadness, irritability, nervousness and low energy. Furthermore, they had lower family support, lower academic success, unfair treatment, loneliness and nobody to share or to worry about their problems and lower quality of life; e-media and excessive mobile phone use, tobacco and alcohol use, and some violent behaviors were also associated with the presence of frequent headaches. Conclusion: In spite of these significant associations, the logistic regression model explaining 38% of the variance included mostly other health complaints.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Perception of quantity and quality of sleep and their association with health related quality of life and life satisfaction during adolescence

Copyright: © 2017 Matos MG. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Objectives: This study aims to analyse differences between sleep duration and sleep quality and their association with health related quality of life and life satisfaction during adolescence. Methods: The Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) survey is based on a self-completed questionnaire. The participants in the present study were 3631 students (53.1% were girls) in the 8th and 10th grades at school; the mean age was 14.8 years (range 13-18). Results: The present results add to previous ones that both the duration and the perceived quality of sleep have impact upon the perception of quality of life and the perception of life satisfaction. Conclusions: These results are substantially important for sleep hygiene and for recommendations for adolescents, parents, health and education professionals and public policies. It is now widely recommended that adolescents must sleep at least 8 hours per night, what this study allow to recommend is that the perception of quality of that sleep is equally important, and this leads to another set of recommendations to increase sleep quality, that include not exercising or practising sports in the evenings, avoiding conflicts at home in the evenings, no going to bed worried, no having caffeine and other energetic drinks in the evening, not abusing screen time after dinner or in bed. These recommendations are important to assure sleep duration and perceived quality and therefore the perception of wellness and life satisfaction, having an additional impact on health and on school achievement.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Caffeine, sleep duration and adolescents’ perception of health related quality of life

© 2016 Matos et al.; This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Introduction: The main objective of this study was to understand the impact of caffeine on adolescents’ health and health related behaviours, namely sleep duration and health related quality of life. Methods: Students in the 6th, 8th and 10th grades were chosen randomly from clusters of schools for this study. A questionnaire designed to measure caffeine consumption, sleep quantity and quality and health related quality of life was used. ANOVAs were used for gender and grade and three multilinear regression models were conducted. Results: Coffee and soft drinks with caffeine have a negative impact in sleep duration. Both sleep duration and quality have a positive effect on health related quality of life. Although the use of energetic drinks with alcohol is low, it has a negative impact on the perception of health quality of life. Males have shown a better perception of health related quality of life and greater quantity and quality of sleep while females report more difficulties falling asleep and report more fatigue. Conclusions: Caffeine intake has a negative impact on sleep duration and perception of health related quality of life, although accounting for a relatively low variance.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Sleep and sex sleep in adolescence : sex matters?

© 2019 All rights reservedObjective: Sleep is of upmost importance for everybody and especially for adolescents who face life and leisure challenges that may impair their sleep. This study aimed to verify if girls are at a higher risk to present sleep problems and if associations of a sleep perception are different between sexes even when accounting for biological maturation. Methods: Data is from the HBSC Portuguese survey 2014, all variables were self-reported. Participants were 3869 adolescents (2057 girls), mean age 14.8 years. Participants’ socio-demographic characteristics included sex, age, school grade, father and mother education; besides participants were inquired about sleep duration and characteristics of their sleep quality. Results: Sleep deprivation was reported by 13.1% of the adolescents (girls 14.3%, boys 11.7%, p<0.05). The most prevalent characteristics of poor sleep quality were waking up tired (50.8%) and difficulties falling asleep (19.5%), for both girls presented higher prevalence than boys. Overall, girls presented a poorer sleep health with low quality and quantity of sleep. Furthermore, associations of an enough and good sleep were different between boys and girls, even when controlling for the impact of delayed pubertal maturity. Discussion: Together with screen time, substance use, poorer nutrition, sedentary behaviours and abuse of screen time, sleep is an issue that must be addressed by professionals, families and public policies with impact in family life and family routines. Modelling a health education in schools should include the sleep topic. In addition, yes, sex matters and must be included on board.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Development of a LAMP assay for detection of Leishmania infantum infection in dogs using conjunctival swab samples

Background: Leishmania infantum infections in dogs play a crucial role in the transmission of pathogens causing visceral leishmaniasis to humans in the Gansu province, northwest China. To be able to control zoonotic transmission of the parasite to humans, a non-invasive loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay to specifically detect L. infantum infections in dogs was developed. Methods: The primers used in the LAMP assay were designed to target kinetoplast DNA minicircle sequences of the L. infantum isolate MCAN/CN/90/SC and tested using DNA isolated from promastigotes of different Leishmania species. The LAMP assay was evaluated with conjunctional swab samples obtained from 111 and 33 dogs living in an endemic and a non-endemic region of zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis in the Gansu province, respectively. The LAMP assay was also compared with conventional PCR, ELISA and microscopy using conjunctional swab, serum and bone marrow samples from the dogs, respectively. Results: The LAMP assay detected 1 fg of L. infantum DNA purified from cultured promastigotes which was 10-fold more sensitive than a conventional PCR test using Leishmania genus-specific primers. No cross reaction was observed with DNA isolated from promastigotes of L. donovani, L. major, L. tropica, and L. braziliensis, and the L. infantum reference strain MHOM/TN/80/IPT1. The L. infantum-positive rates obtained for field-collected samples were 61.3%, 58.6%, 40.5% and 10.8% by LAMP, PCR, ELISA and microscopy, respectively. As only one out of the 33 samples from control dogs from the non-endemic region of zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis was positive by the LAMP assay and the PCR test, the observed true negative rate (specificity) was 97% for both methods. Conclusion: This study has shown that the non-invasive, conjunctional swab-based LAMP assay developed was more sensitive in the detection of leishmaniasis in dogs than PCR, ELISA and microscopy. The findings indicate that the LAMP assay is a sensitive and specific method for the field surveillance of domestic dogs, particularly of asymptomatic canines, in ZVL-endemic areas in western China