An inquiry into the size of health charities: The case of Norwegian patient organisations

This paper analyses the extents to which variations in revenues and memberships of health charities – or patient organisations – might be explained by characteristics of the diseases that the organisations represent. After a theoretical discussion it inquires into 45 Norwegian patient organisations. The findings suggest that prevalence, followed by death risk are the most important characteristics of the disease for explaining charity size. There were indications that the status of the disease influenced memberships. Still, the most significant variables to explain revenues are the organisation’s age and its memberships. Cross-sectional comparisons gave no indications that public revenues ‘crowd out’ private donations.Health charities; disease characteristics

Reproducibility of a web-based FFQ for 13- to 15-year-old Danish adolescents

FFQ are widely used in large-scale studies to assess dietary intake. To aid interpretation of diet–disease associations assessment of validity must be performed. Reproducibility is one aspect of validity focusing on the stability of repeated assessment with the same method which may also reveal problems in instrument design or participant instructions. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the reproducibility of a web-based FFQ targeting Danish adolescents within the Danish National Birth Cohort (DNBC). Data for the present study were obtained from a prospective design nested within the DNBC. Adolescents aged 13 to 15 years old (n 48, 60 % girls) completed the FFQ twice 4 weeks apart. The proportion of adolescents consistently classified into the same tertile according to amount of food intake ranged from 45 % (fish) to 77 % (vegetables), whereas classification into opposite tertiles ranged from 0 % (fruit, oils and dressing) to 15 % (beverages). Overall, no significant differences were observed in intake of food groups or nutrients between the two completions of the FFQ. Mean crude Spearman correlation for all food groups was 0·56 and mean intra-class correlation for all food groups was 0·61. In conclusion, the reproducibility of the FFQ for Danish adolescents was acceptable. The study revealed that adolescents aged 13–15 years seemed capable of recalling consistently overall dietary habits and had some difficulties estimating the frequency of consumption of regularly consumed food items

Reaction kinetics determined from core flooding and steady state principles for Stevns Klint and Kansas chalk injected with MgCl2 brine at reservoir temperature

A methodology is presented for determining reaction kinetics from core flooding: A core is flooded with reactive brine at different compositions with injection rates varied systematically. Each combination is performed until steady state, when effluent concentrations no longer change significantly with time. Lower injection rate gives the brine more time to react. We also propose shut-in tests where brine reacts statically with the core a defined period and then is flushed out. The residence time and produced brine composition is compared with the flooding experiments. This design allows characterization of the reaction kinetics from a single core. Efficient modeling and matching of the experiments can be performed as the steady state data are directly comparable to equilibrating the injected brine gradually with time and does not require spatial and temporal modeling of the entire dynamic experiments. Each steady state data point represents different information that helps constrain parameter selection. The reaction kinetics can predict equilibrium states and time needed to reach equilibrium. Accounting for dispersion increases the complexity by needing to find a spatial distribution of coupled solutions and is recommended as a second step when a first estimate of the kinetics has been obtained. It is still much more efficient than simulating the full dynamic experiment. Experiments were performed injecting 0.0445 and 0.219 mol/L MgCl2 into Stevns Klint chalk from Denmark, and Kansas chalk from USA. The reaction kinetics of chalk are important as oil-bearing chalk reservoirs are chemically sensitive to injected seawater. The reactions can alter wettability and weaken rock strength which has implications for reservoir compaction, oil recovery and reservoir management. The temperature was 100 and 130°C (North Sea reservoir temperature). The rates during flooding were varied from 0.25 to 16 PV/d while shut-in tests provided equivalent rates down to 1/28 PV/d. The results showed that Ca2+ ions were produced and Mg2+ ions retained (associated with calcite dissolution and magnesite precipitation, respectively). This occurred in a substitution-like manner, where the gain of Ca was similar to the loss of Mg2+. A simple reaction kinetic model based on this substitution with three independent tuning parameters (rate coefficient, reaction order and equilibrium constant) was implemented together with advection to analytically calculate steady state effluent concentrations when injected composition, injection rate and reaction kinetic parameters were stated. By tuning reaction kinetic parameters, the experimental steady state data could be fitted efficiently. From data trends, the parameters were determined relatively accurate for each core. The roles of reaction parameters, pore velocity and dispersion were illustrated with sensitivity analyses. The steady state method allows computationally efficient matching even with complex reaction kinetics. Using a comprehensive geochemical description in the software PHREEQC, the kinetics of calcite and magnesite mineral reactions were determined by matching the steady state concentration changes as function of (residence) time. The simulator predicted close to identical production of Ca as loss of Mg. The geochemical software predicted much higher calcite solubility in MgCl2 than observed at 100 and 130°C for Stevns Klint and Kansas.acceptedVersio

Mother's dietary quality during pregnancy and offspring's dietary quality in adolescence:Follow-up from a national birth cohort study of 19,582 mother-offspring pairs

BackgroundThe Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis postulates that exposures during early life, such as maternal dietary intake during pregnancy, may have a lifelong impact on the individual's susceptibility to diseases. The individual's own lifestyle habits are obviously an additional factor, but we have only limited knowledge regarding how it may interact with prenatal exposures in determining later disease. To gain further insight into these potentially complex relationships, we examined the longitudinal association between maternal diet quality during pregnancy and diet quality in early adolescence in a contemporary cohort.Methods and findingsFrom 1996 to 2003, the Danish National Birth Cohort (DNBC) was established. Women from across the country were enrolled, and dietary intake in midpregnancy was assessed concurrently with a 360-item food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) (https://www.dnbc.dk/-/media/arkiv/projekt-sites/dnbc/kodeboeger/dnbc-food-frequency-questionnaire/dnbc-food-frequency-questionnaire-pdf.pdf?la=en). During 2013-2018, dietary intake was assessed at age 14 years with a 150-item FFQ (https://www.dnbc.dk/-/media/arkiv/projekt-sites/dnbc/kodeboeger/ffq-14/dnbc-ffq-14-english-translation.pdf?la=en) in the DNBC children. Among the 19,582 mother-offspring pairs included in the analyses, the mean age (±standard deviation [SD]) was 30.7 (±4.1) years and 14.0 (±0.0) years for mothers and offspring, respectively. The majority of both mothers (67%) and offspring (76%) were classified as normal weight. For both questionnaires, a Healthy Eating Index (HEI) was developed as an indicator for diet quality based on current Danish Food-Based Dietary Guidelines (FBDG) including eight components: fruits and vegetables, fish, dietary fibres, red meat, saturated fatty acids (SFAs), sodium, sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), and added sugar. The HEI score was divided into quartiles; individuals in the highest quartile represented those with the most optimal diet. The maternal HEI score was correlated positively with offspring HEI score (Pearson r = 0.22, p ConclusionsIn this study using data from a large national birth cohort, we observed that maternal diet quality during pregnancy was associated with diet quality of the offspring at age 14 years. These findings indicate the importance of separating early dietary exposures from later dietary exposures when studying dietary aetiologies of diseases postulated to have developmental origins such as, for instance, obesity or asthma in observational settings

Relative validity of a web-based food frequency questionnaire for Danish adolescents

Background: With increased focus on dietary intake among youth and risk of diseases later in life, it is of importance, prior to assessing diet-disease relationships, to examine the validity of the dietary assessment tool. This study’s objective was to evaluate the relative validity of a self-administered web-based FFQ among Danish children aged 12 to 15 years. Methods: From a nested sub-cohort within the Danish National Birth Cohort, 124 adolescents participated. Four weeks after completion of the FFQ, adolescents were invited to complete three telephone-based 24HRs; administered 4 weeks apart. Mean or median intakes of nutrients and food groups estimated from the FFQ were compared with the mean of 3x24HRs. To assess the level of ranking we calculated the proportion of correctly classified into the same quartile, and the proportion of misclassified (into the opposite quartile). Spearman’s correlation coefficients and de-attenuated coefficients were calculated to assess agreement between the FFQ and 24HRs. Results: The mean percentage of all food groups, for adolescents classified into the same and opposite quartile was 35 and 7.5%, respectively. Mean Spearman’s correlation was 0.28 for food groups and 0.35 for nutrients, respectively. Adjustment for energy and within-person variation in the 24HRs had little effect on the magnitude of the correlations for food groups and nutrients. We found overestimation by the FFQ compared with the 24HRs for fish, fruits, vegetables, oils and dressing and underestimation by the FFQ for meat/poultry and sweets. Median intake of beverages, dairy, bread, cereals, the mean total energy and carbohydrate intake did not differ significantly between the two methods. Conclusion: The relative validity of the FFQ compared with the 3x24HRs showed that the ranking ability differed across food groups and nutrients with best ranking for estimated intake of dairy, fruits, and oils and dressing. Larger variation was observed for fish, sweets and vegetables. For nutrients, the ranking ability was acceptable for fatty acids and iron. When evaluating estimates from the FFQ among Danish adolescents these findings should be considered.The study was supported by grants from The Danish Research Council 09–067124 (Center for Fetal Programming), 09–075611; and the Intramural Research Program of The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health (contract # HHSN275201000020C). The funding bodies had no role in the design of the study, collection, analysis, interpretation of data or in writing the manuscript.Peer Reviewe

Assessing safety climate in prehospital settings: Testing psychometric properties of a common structural model in a cross-sectional and prospective study

Background Little research exists on patient safety climate in the prehospital context. The purpose of this article is to test and validate a safety climate measurement model for the prehospital environment, and to explore and develop a theoretical model measuring associations between safety climate factors and the outcome variable transitions and handoffs. Methods A web-based survey design was utilized. An adjusted short version of the instrument Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture (HSOPSC) was developed into a hypothetical structural model. Three samples were obtained. Two from air ambulance workers in 2012 and 2016, with respectively 83 and 55% response rate, and the third from the ground ambulance workers in 2016, with 26% response rate. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was applied to test validity and psychometric properties. Internal consistency was estimated and descriptive data analysis was performed. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was applied to assess the theoretical model developed for the prehospital setting. Results A post-hoc modified instrument consisting of six dimensions and 17 items provided overall acceptable psychometric properties for all samples, i.e. acceptable Chronbach’s alphas (.68–.86) and construct validity (model fit values: SRMR; .026–.056, TLI; .95–.98, RMSEA; .031–.052, CFI; .96–.98). A common structural model could also be established. Conclusions The results provided a validated instrument, the Prehospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture short version (PreHSOPSC-S), for measuring patient safety climate in a prehospital context. We also demonstrated a positive relation between safety climate dimensions from leadership to unit level, from unit to individual level, and from individual level on the outcome dimension related to transitions and handoffs. Safe patient transitions and handoffs are considered an important outcome of prehospital deliveries; hence, new theory and a validated model will constitute an important contribution to the prehospital safety climate research.publishedVersio

Relation between seasonally detrended shortwave infrared reflectance data and land surface moisture in semi-arid Sahel

In the Sudano-Sahelian areas of Africa droughts can have serious impacts on natural resources, and therefore land surface moisture is an important factor. Insufficient conventional sites for monitoring land surface moisture make the use of Earth Observation data for this purpose a key issue. In this study we explored the potential of using reflectance data in the Red, Near Infrared (NIR), and Shortwave Infrared (SWIR) spectral regions for detecting short term variations in land surface moisture in the Sahel, by analyzing data from three test sites and observations from the geostationary Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite. We focused on responses in surface reflectance to soil- and surface moisture for bare soil and early to mid- growing season. A method for implementing detrended time series of the Shortwave Infrared Water Stress Index (SIWSI) is examined for detecting variations in vegetation moisture status, and is compared to detrended time series of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). It was found that when plant available water is low, the SIWSI anomalies increase over time, while the NDVI anomalies decrease over time, but less systematically. Therefore SIWSI may carry important complementary information to NDVI in terms of vegetation water status, and can provide this information with the unique combination of temporal and spatial resolution from optical geostationary observations over Sahel. However, the relation between SIWSI anomalies and periods of water stress were not found to be sufficiently robust to be used for water stress detection