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Youth overweight and obesity (OWOB) surveillance often uses body mass index (BMI) derived from self-reported height and weight, but these measures can suffer from high proportions of missing data. Complete case analysis (CCA) is the most common approach to handle missing data, but this approach can introduce bias if missing data are not missing completely at random. Using BMI and related covariate data from 36,546 female and 37,126 male youth aged 12–19 years who participated in the COMPASS study in 2018/19, where approximately 30% of BMI data were missing, results and inference were compared between CCA and multiple imputation (MI) approaches to examine associations with youth BMI. Results of regression joint models showed contrasting findings between MI and CCA, highlighting that appropriate methodological choices in the handling of missing data are essential in youth OWOB research and that choices can impact research inference and thereby associated policy and programming recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Model Selection is a ubiquitous task in the model building process that seeks a parsimonious model to explain patterns in data. Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC) is one such tool that is used in applications for its property of consistency, where this term is traditionally synonymous with asymptotic consistency. This article introduces the concept of exact consistency in model selection (which places an upper bound on the probability of selecting under-fitted models) to elucidate finite-sample properties of asymptotically consistent criteria. A new class of criteria gBIC is proposed with conditions for candidate model priors that guarantee exact and asymptotic consistency. gBIC provides a theoretical means to assess the consistency of existing BIC variants by simply checking functional properties of their respective penalty components. It is shown that gBIC includes sample size adjusted BIC (SABIC) as a special case, and improves on BIC with the proposed model-modified BIC (mBIC). In comparison to BIC, mBIC guarantees higher success rates for selecting models that match or contain the data generating model at any sample size for linear regression and time series. Lastly, mBIC can easily be adopted in linear regression and time series via simple algebraic adjustments to BIC/SABIC values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the association between religious participation and executive function in a national sample of Canadian adults aged 45 to 85 years. Executive function scores were aggregated from six neurocognitive tests. We regressed the aggregate scores onto religious participation and controlled for numerous covariates. The analyses were stratified by age: 45 to 64 years and ≥ 65 years. In comparison to persons who reported never participating in religious activities, persons who reported daily-weekly participation had statistically significantly lower executive function scores; we observed this finding for both age groups. Associations for monthly-yearly religious participation versus never participating were also inverse yet not necessarily statistically significant at the 5% level. The strongest inverse associations were observed in models adjusted for social networks, social support, and social participation. Our findings mesh with recent research and suggest the need to carefully assess the role of religious participation when promoting executive function. Future research warrants employing longitudinal designs to further investigate the association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate the association between religious participation and memory in persons aged 45–85 years. Using the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, frequency of religious participation was measured from "daily" to "never"; immediate and delayed recall memory were assessed with the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test. We regressed memory onto religious participation for persons aged < 65 years and persons aged ≥ 65 years. We found some evidence of effect modification: among persons < 65 years, monthly to yearly participation versus never attending was positively associated with immediate and delayed recall memory; among persons aged ≥ 65 years, weekly or more participation versus never attending was negatively associated with immediate and delayed recall memory. However, regression coefficients were small (−0.09 ≤ B ≤ 0.06) and most were not statistically significant (p < 0.05). Insufficient evidence existed to conclude that religious participation was associated with memory in our sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]