Health problems account for a small part of the association between socioeconomic status and disability pension award. Results from the Hordaland Health Study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Low socioeconomic status is a known risk factor for disability pension, and is also associated with health problems. To what degree health problems can explain the increased risk of disability pension award associated with low socioeconomic status is not known.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Information on 15,067 participants in the Hordaland Health Study was linked to a comprehensive national registry on disability pension awards. Level of education was used as a proxy for socioeconomic status. Logistic regression analyses were employed to examine the association between socioeconomic status and rates of disability pension award, before and after adjusting for a wide range of somatic and mental health factors. The proportion of the difference in disability pension between socioeconomic groups explained by health was then calculated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Unadjusted odds ratios for disability pension was 4.60 (95% CI: 3.34-6.33) for the group with elementary school only (9 years of education) and 2.03 (95% CI 1.49-2.77) for the group with high school (12 years of education) when compared to the group with higher education (more than 12 years). When adjusting for somatic and mental health, odds ratios were reduced to 3.87 (2.73-5.47) and 1.81 (1.31-2.52). This corresponds to health explaining only a marginal proportion of the increased level of disability pension in the groups with lower socioeconomic status.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>There is a socioeconomic gradient in disability pension similar to the well known socioeconomic gradient in health. However, health accounts for little of the socioeconomic gradient in disability pension. Future studies of socioeconomic gradients in disability pension should focus on explanatory factors beyond health.</p

Assessing the heritability of anorexia nervosa symptoms using a marginal maximal likelihood approach

Assessment of eating disorders at the symptom level can facilitate the refinement of phenotypes. We examined genetic and environmental contributions to liability to anorexia nervosa (AN) symptoms in a population-based twin sample using a genetic common pathway model

Breastfeeding practice in mothers with eating disorders

The purpose of this study was to compare the prevalence of breastfeeding in women with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder and eating disorders not otherwise specified - purging subtype, with mothers with no eating disorders during the first 6 months after birth. The study is based on the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study conducted at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. Questionnaire-based information on eating disorder diagnoses and breastfeeding in 39 355 women was used to estimate the risk of cessation of breastfeeding with Cox proportional hazards regression. Almost all women (98%) initially breastfeed their infants, with no statistically significant difference between the eating disorders subgroups and women with no eating disorders. However, the risk of early cessation before 6 months post-partum increased for all subgroups of mothers with eating disorders, compared with mothers with no eating disorders. After adjusting for maternal body mass index, age, education, birthweight and pre-term birth, only mothers with anorexia nervosa [hazard ratios (HR), 2.35; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.22-4.53] and eating disorder not otherwise specified-purging subtype (HR, 1.95; 95% CI 1.08-3.53) had increased risk for cessation of breastfeeding There were no differences in the risk of cessation of exclusive breastfeeding. These results show that some eating disorders may influence mothers' early feeding practices and indicate that additional support may be necessary to assist women with anorexia nervosa in maintaining breastfeeding

Dietary supplement use immediately before and during pregnancy in Norwegian women with eating disorders

Many pregnant women use dietary supplements. Little is known about dietary supplement use during pregnancy in women with eating disorders

Advantages of linking national registries with twin registries for epidemiological research

Linking national registries with twin data represents an opportunity to produce epidemiological research of high quality. National registries contain information on a broad array of variables, some of which cannot be measured reliably in regular health surveys. By taking kinship into consideration, twin studies have the benefit of being able to identify confounding stemming from genetic or shared environmental sources. In this paper, we use examples from our own interview and questionnaire-based twin studies from the Norwegian Twin Registry (NTR) on mental disorders, alcohol use and socioeconomic status linked to registry data on medical benefits to demonstrate the value. In the first example, we examined to what extent genetic and environmental factors contributed to sick leave and disability pension and the association between these two types of benefits. In the second example, we explored the genetic and environmental relationship between personality disorders and sick leave. In the third example, a co-twin control design was applied to explore whether there is a true protective relationship between moderate alcohol consumption and health. The fourth example shows to what degree anxiety and depression are associated with later sick leave granted for not only mental disorders, but also somatic disorders, adjusted for confounding by genetic and shared environmental factors. In the fifth example, we address the socioeconomic gradient in sick leave, adjusting for non-observed confounders associated with the family in a co-twin control design. Our examples illustrate some of the potentials obtainable by linking national registries with twin data. The efforts that have been made to create the NTR in Norway and the International Network of Twin Studies (INTR) internationally make these types of linkage studies easier to conduct and available to more researchers. As there are still many areas to explore, we encourage epidemiological researchers to make use of this possibility

Effects of sample handling and analytical procedures on thyroid hormone concentrations in pregnant women's plasma

Background: Maternal thyroid function is a critical mediator of fetal brain development. Pregnancy-related physiologic changes and handling conditions of blood samples may influence thyroid hormone biomarkers. We investigated the reliability of thyroid hormone biomarkers in plasma of pregnant women under various handling conditions. Methods: We enrolled 17 pregnant women; collected serum and plasma were immediately frozen. Additional plasma aliquots were subjected to different handling conditions before the analysis of thyroid biomarkers: storage at room temperature for 24 or 48 hours before freezing and an extra freeze-Thaw cycle. We estimated free thyroid hormone indices in plasma based on T3 uptake. Results: High correlations between plasma and serum (>0.94) and intraclass correlation coefficients for plasma handling conditions (0.96 to 1.00) indicated excellent reliability for all thyroid hormone biomarkers. Conclusion: Delayed freezing and freeze-Thaw cycles did not affect reliability of biomarkers of thyroid function in plasma during pregnancy. See video abstract at, http://links.lww.com/EDE/B180

Musculoskeletal pain and work absence – a 10 year follow-up study of Norwegian young adult twins

Background and aims: Sickness absence (SA) and disability pension (DP) are increasingly recognized as major public problems. Musculoskeletal disorders are among the most common diagnoses set by physicians granting SA and DP. Results from recent twin studies have established that SA and DP are influenced not only by environmental and social factors, but also moderately to substantially by genes. The aim of the current study was to examine to what degree musculoskeletal complaints in young adults predict SA and DP, including SA granted for other diagnoses. As the participants were twins, we were able to perform within pair analyses, to see if the associations between musculoskeletal pain and later DP or SA were confounded by unmeasured genetic and shared environmental factors. Materials and methods: The Norwegian twin registry includes a questionnaire conducted in 1998. From this, we included three measures of recurrent pain (lower back, neck/shoulders and muscular) as well as symptoms of anxiety and depression (measured by the Symptom Checklist-5 (SCL-5)). The questionnaire has been linked to highly reliable official registries on SA and DP, as well as a range of sociodemographic variables, for a ten-year follow up period. We applied logistic (DP as dependent variable) and binomial regression (SA as dependent variable) analyses to explore the relationship between musculoskeletal pain and DP and SA. In the final models, we adjusted for sociodemographic factors and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Differences between twins in a pair were explored by applying fixed effect models. All analyses were conducted using STATA version 13.1. Results: The final sample of 7,626 twins included 3,055 complete pairs (488 monozygotic (MZ) male, 349 dizygotic (DZ) male, 747 MZ female, 589 DZ female, and 882 opposite sex twin pairs) and 1,516 singletons. By the end of follow up, 181 subjects (44 men and 137 women) received DP, and 63.7% of the sample (47.4% of males and 76.0% of females) had at least one period of SA extending 16 days. Pain at any site was significantly associated with DP in both sexes. Any increase in the number of pain sites reported was associated with about a 60% increased risk for receiving DP (OR 1.6, 95% CI 1.4-1.9), and the strength of the association was only marginally reduced when adjusted for symptoms of mental disorders (1.4, 1.2- 1.7). In the within pair analyses the effect was no longer significant, indicating possible confounding from genetic and shared environmental effects. As for all cause SA, musculoskeletal pain predicted SA independently of all measured confounders, and the results remained significant in the within pair analyses (Incidence Rate Ratio (IRR) 1.12, 95% CI 1.03-1.23). Conclusion: In young adults, musculoskeletal pain strongly predicted SA and DP for a 10 year follow-up period. Musculoskeletal pain was associated with higher levels of all cause SA, even within discordant MZ twin pairs. Our results indicate that interventions to prevent musculoskeletal pain in young adults can reduce levels of SA and DP

A LEKID-based CMB instrument design for large-scale observations in Greenland

We present the results of a feasibility study, which examined deployment of a ground-based millimeter-wave polarimeter, tailored for observing the cosmic microwave background (CMB), to Isi Station in Greenland. The instrument for this study is based on lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors (LEKIDs) and an F/2.4 catoptric, crossed-Dragone telescope with a 500 mm aperture. The telescope is mounted inside the receiver and cooled to $<\,4$ K by a closed-cycle $^4$He refrigerator to reduce background loading on the detectors. Linearly polarized signals from the sky are modulated with a metal-mesh half-wave plate that is rotated at the aperture stop of the telescope with a hollow-shaft motor based on a superconducting magnetic bearing. The modular detector array design includes at least 2300 LEKIDs, and it can be configured for spectral bands centered on 150~GHz or greater. Our study considered configurations for observing in spectral bands centered on 150, 210 and 267~GHz. The entire polarimeter is mounted on a commercial precision rotary air bearing, which allows fast azimuth scan speeds with negligible vibration and mechanical wear over time. A slip ring provides power to the instrument, enabling circular scans (360 degrees of continuous rotation). This mount, when combined with sky rotation and the latitude of the observation site, produces a hypotrochoid scan pattern, which yields excellent cross-linking and enables 34\% of the sky to be observed using a range of constant elevation scans. This scan pattern and sky coverage combined with the beam size (15~arcmin at 150~GHz) makes the instrument sensitive to $5 < \ell < 1000$ in the angular power spectra

Association between co-twin sex and eating disorders in opposite sex twin pairs: Evaluations in North American, Norwegian, and Swedish samples

These three studies examined the hypothesis that prenatal exposure to sex hormones influences twins’ risk for eating disorders based on co-twin sex, such that individuals with a female co-twin would be more likely than individuals with a male co-twin to meet diagnostic criteria for an eating disorder