Parents’ health and children’s help

[…] highly responsive to problems arising from a parent’s health that limit a parent’s mobility or their ability to live independently in a community. But it is not responsive to severe difficulties requiring daily care. The estimates of responsiveness that are based fully or partially on between-individual variation overstate the impact of parent’s health on help.

Stratification by smoking status reveals an association of CHRNA5-A3-B4 genotype with Body Mass Index in never smokers

[…] smoking. It would therefore be essentially undetectable in an unstratified genome-wide association study of BMI, given the opposite association with BMI in never and current smokers. This demonstrates that novel associations may be obscured by hidden population sub-structure. Stratification on well-characterized environmental factors known to impact on health outcomes may therefore reveal novel genetic associations.

A social rank explanation of how money influences health

[…] health, physical functioning, role limitations, and pain. The health benefits of high rank were consistent in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses and did not depend on the reference-group used to rank participants. Conclusions: This is the first study to demonstrate that social position rather than material conditions may explain the impact of money on human health.

DNA methylation signature of passive smoke exposure is less pronounced than active smoking: the Understanding Society study

Introduction: The extent of the biological impact of passive smoke exposure is unclear. We sought to investigate the association between passive smoke exposure and DNA methylation, which could serve as a biomarker of health risk. Materials and Methods: We derived passive smoke exposure from self-reported questionnaire data among smoking and non-smoking partners of participants […]