Do supplemental list frames for subpopulations increase subpopulation sampling efficiency? Evidence from the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey

Multiple-frame sampling has been regarded as a device for increasing efficiency in identifying small subpopulations. However, there has been a lack of empirical evidence in supporting the efficiency of the multiple-frame approach and in guiding best practices. The current study focuses on a special scenario in which two frames were used to recruit sample members. Using paradata from the U.S. National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS), the current analysis focuses on recruiting households that received Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as a sub-goal of the survey sampling. SNAP households account for around one-fifth of the general U.S. population, compared to a survey goal of 30 percent of responding households. Our findings were consistent with theoretical expectations. Having and using additional SNAP list frames improved the efficiency of identifying SNAP households as opposed to screening a general address-based sample frame. This efficiency remained even as the SNAP list frames aged

A Pregnancy and Childhood Epigenetics Consortium (PACE) meta-analysis highlights potential relationships between birth order and neonatal blood DNA methylation

Higher birth order is associated with altered risk of many disease states. Changes in placentation and exposures to in utero growth factors with successive pregnancies may impact later life disease risk via persistent DNA methylation alterations. We investigated birth order with Illumina DNA methylation array data in each of 16 birth cohorts (8164 newborns) with European, African, and Latino ancestries from the Pregnancy and Childhood Epigenetics Consortium. Meta-analyzed data demonstrated systematic DNA methylation variation in 341 CpGs (FDR adjusted P &lt; 0.05) and 1107 regions. Forty CpGs were located within known quantitative trait loci for gene expression traits in blood, and trait enrichment analysis suggested a strong association with immune-related, transcriptional control, and blood pressure regulation phenotypes. Decreasing fertility rates worldwide with the concomitant increased proportion of first-born children highlights a potential reflection of birth order-related epigenomic states on changing disease incidence trends.</p

A Pregnancy and Childhood Epigenetics Consortium (PACE) meta-analysis highlights potential relationships between birth order and neonatal blood DNA methylation

Higher birth order is associated with altered risk of many disease states. Changes in placentation and exposures to in utero growth factors with successive pregnancies may impact later life disease risk via persistent DNA methylation alterations. We investigated birth order with Illumina DNA methylation array data in each of 16 birth cohorts (8164 newborns) with European, African, and Latino ancestries from the Pregnancy and Childhood Epigenetics Consortium. Meta-analyzed data demonstrated systematic DNA methylation variation in 341 CpGs (FDR adjusted P &lt; 0.05) and 1107 regions. Forty CpGs were located within known quantitative trait loci for gene expression traits in blood, and trait enrichment analysis suggested a strong association with immune-related, transcriptional control, and blood pressure regulation phenotypes. Decreasing fertility rates worldwide with the concomitant increased proportion of first-born children highlights a potential reflection of birth order-related epigenomic states on changing disease incidence trends.</p

Comparison of the structure of the plasma-facing surface and tritium accumulation in beryllium tiles from JET ILW campaigns 2011-2012 and 2013-2014

In this study, beryllium tiles from Joint European Torus (JET) vacuum vessel wall were analysed and compared regarding their position in the vacuum vessel and differences in the exploitation conditions during two campaigns of ITER-Like-Wall (ILW) in 2011–2012 (ILW1) and 2013–2014 (ILW2) Tritium content in beryllium samples were assessed. Two methods were used to measure tritium content in the samples – dissolution under controlled conditions and tritium thermal desorption. Prior to desorption and dissolution experiments, scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy were used to study structure and chemical composition of plasma-facing-surfaces of the beryllium samples. Experimental results revealed that tritium content in the samples is in range of 2·10$^{11}$–2·10$^{13}$ tritium atoms per square centimetre of the surface area with its highest content in the samples from the outer wall of the vacuum vessel (up to 1.9·10$^{13}$ atoms/cm$^{2}$ in ILW1 campaign and 2.4·10$^{13}$ atoms/cm$^{2}$ in ILW2). The lowest content of tritium was found in the upper part of the vacuum vessel (2.0·10$^{12}$ atoms/cm$^{2}$ and 2.0·10$^{11}$ atoms/cm$^{2}$ in ILW1 and ILW2, respectively). Results obtained from scanning electron microscopy has shown that surface morphology is different within single tile, however if to compare two campaigns main tendencies remains similar

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

New Data Linkages Provide Healthfulness Measures for American Grocery Store Sales

Newly established data links between retail food sales data and USDA nutrition databases now allow researchers to study the composition and healthfulness of Americans’ purchases at retail stores. ERS researchers used this new linked data to score the nutritional quality of retail food sales and found substantial room for improvement

Trends in Food Recalls

A new ERS infographic categorizes the 4,900 U.S. food recalls issued from 2004 through 2013 by type of food, reason for the recall, and geographic distribution across States

Lettuce Help: USDA data on shipments of romaine lettuce can inform foodborne illness outbreak investigations and public health advisories

A study by ERS researchers demonstrates how USDA data on daily shipments of romaine lettuce can be used to determine which producing regions within the United States are free from contamination during a foodborne illness outbreak. The study finds that among the 29 outbreaks of Shiga-toxin producing Escherichia coli (STEC) O157:H7 associated with romaine lettuce between 1998 and 2018, illnesses peaked in April and October, which corresponds with the tail end of the harvest season in the two main romaine growing regions

Lettuce Help: USDA data on shipments of romaine lettuce can inform foodborne illness outbreak investigations and public health advisories

A study by ERS researchers demonstrates how USDA data on daily shipments of romaine lettuce can be used to determine which producing regions within the United States are free from contamination during a foodborne illness outbreak. The study finds that among the 29 outbreaks of Shiga-toxin producing Escherichia coli (STEC) O157:H7 associated with romaine lettuce between 1998 and 2018, illnesses peaked in April and October, which corresponds with the tail end of the harvest season in the two main romaine growing regions