Risks and protective factors for children experiencing adverse events

For children growing up in poverty, risk is part of everyday life. Experiences of chronic poverty are often compounded by multiple and recurrent risks and shocks or adverse events. ‘Shocks’ are unexpected events, such as drought, price fluctuations or family illness or death, that have a negative impact on the household economy. Children’s life chances in education, health, and well-being are closely bound up with, and shaped by, the situation of their households, and their socio-cultural environment, as well as the unequal distribution of power, wealth, and opportunities in societies; all these factors frequently disadvantage the same families (Boyden and Dercon 2012; Pells 2012). However, children are not only affected by shocks, but are also social agents, active in decisions made and strategies adopted in attempting to mitigate the impact of adverse circumstances on their household and on their lives

Advancing the Sustainable Development Goal for Education Through Developmentally Informed Approaches to Measurement

Abstract: While the past decade has seen increased global efforts to develop reliable and valid measures of developmental phenomena for use in diverse populations within and across countries, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and in particular the education goal (SDG4) have revealed a dearth of meaningful and valid measures and indicators to monitor countries’ progress toward achieving the 10 SDG4 targets. Developmental science can a) inform the choice of outcomes, processes, and mechanisms that yield the greatest promise in advancing countries ability to formulate solutions; and b) provide guidance on how to measure educational phenomena to ensure maximum policy relevance. Moving forward, developmental science will need to provide rigorous evidence on measures that incorporate the principles of bioecological frameworks on human development and learning to capture the complexity of the multi-level, multi-dimensional, dynamic processes of development and learning that are relevant to achieving SDG4. The chapter concludes with specific recommendations for how developmental scientists can ensure that their research is directly relevant to and can best support the SDG process

Blood lipid levels and prostate cancer risk; a cohort study

Item does not contain fulltextIt has been hypothesized that blood lipid levels might be associated with prostate cancer risk. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the association between serum total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, triglycerides and prostate cancer risk in a cohort study among 2842 Dutch men. By the end of follow-up, 64 incident cases of prostate cancer were identified. Serum total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and triglycerides were evaluated as potential risk factors for prostate cancer using multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression models. These analyses were restricted to men who never used cholesterol-lowering drugs (2118 men, 43 cases). Higher total and higher LDL cholesterol were significantly associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer (hazards ratios (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) per mmol l(-1) were 1.39 (95% CI 1.03-1.88) and 1.42 (95% CI 1.00-2.02), respectively). Similar results were observed for aggressive prostate cancer, whereas for non-aggressive prostate cancer a significant association with HDL cholesterol was found (HR 4.28, 95% CI 1.17-15.67). The results of this study suggest that blood lipid levels may influence risk of prostate cancer. However, the exact roles of different cholesterol fractions on prostate cancer aggressiveness should be further evaluated