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Unlabelled: The aim of this paper is to study and validate the French version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale developed by Radloff (in 1977) in an adolescent sample. This scale was developed to measure levels of depressive symptomatology, with special emphasis on the affective components and depressed mood., Method: The data used in this study were collected in 11 schools. Our sample was composed of 1496 French-speaking, Belgian secondary school students aged 12 to 16 years. The questionnaire included demographic information such as age, gender, grade and family composition. The position of the CES-D scale has not changed and was placed in the last part of the self-administered questionnaire., Results: After an exploratory factor analysis, we conducted confirmatory factor analysis to test our factor model. We tested the model with four factors proposed by Radloff (in 1977) and also the model proposed by Chabrol (in 2002). Our results indicate a better match with Radloff's model in our sample, showing the relevance of using Radloff's model with four factors in adolescents. Although our analysis shows a clear gender difference with regard to depressive symptoms, the tested factor model remained stable regardless of the gender of the adolescent., (Copyright © 2013 L’Encéphale, Paris. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.)

Background: This paper identifies socioeconomic and sociodemographic predictors of respiratory/allergic health problems and subjective complaints in adolescents in Belgium., Methods: A cross-sectional analysis of the 1998 cross-national study "Health Behaviour of School aged Children" (HBSC) in French-speaking Belgium was undertaken. The survey was based on a self-completed questionnaire concerning various aspects of physical, emotional and social health. The five health problems (asthma, any other respiratory difficulty, allergy, poor subjective health, overweight and depressed feeling) were considered present when a positive reply was given to close-end questions stating if the pupils suffered, or have suffered from these problems during the last six months. We analysed a representative sample of 12,012 pupils aged 11 to 19 years in fifth and sixth grades of primary school, and in all six grades of secondary school., Results: socioeconomics gradients were found for subjective ill health, depressed state and overweight (p<0.01). Depressed state and overweight were linearly associated with a family economic score. Respiratory difficulties and allergies were observed mainly in pupils in technical training., Conclusion: Pupils with a lower economic score have a higher prevalence of subjective complaints. It remains important to define determinants of subjective ill health and moreover, to act upon these results by increasing accessibility to health services when necessary, by adapting some others to young people and by tailoring interventions to objective and self-perceived needs.

The problem of dealing with missing values is common throughout statistics and is very prominent with epidemiologic data in the broad sense. Not only do data collection procedures break down, but subjects may be lost to follow up, or simply withdraw their consent without further providing a reason for doing so. In this paper, we review a framework for handling incomplete studies, and then concentrate on a specific case. It comes from a complex health interview survey, conducted in Belgium in 1997, where different types of missingness arise at various levels of the hierarchical sampling procedure.

In this paper, we describe the social distribution of levels of quality of the care to dental caries in 3237 Belgian schoolchildren aged 5 to 21. First, one decayed surface in 4 is filled. The index of filled surfaces of privileged children and of those who regularly consult the dentist is 50% higher than in disadvantaged children and in those who consult for cure. Secondly, one filled surface in 3 is threatened. The index of recurrent caries of privileged children is 30% lower than the one of disadvantaged children. A similar difference is observed between the groups defined by their use of dental services. Thirdly, one decayed surface in 25 is missing. The proportion of missing surfaces is not negligible in disadvantaged children and in those who consult the dentist for cure. We conclude that the system of dental care does not favor equity nor maintenance of dental health.

Screening for rubella in the beginning of pregnancy includes at least one assay for rubella antibodies. If a significant level of antibodies is found, two strategies are possible: 1) to consider the patient as protected if there is no other sign of rubella, or 2) to assess the date of the infection in all cases, repeating the serological tests. In this paper we study the cost of this second strategy. Using a theoretical model of the rubella infection we calculated that the incidence of congenital rubella would be 9 cases in 10 000 newborns in populations with 10% of susceptible women at the age of 25. We studied the cost-effectiveness of a screening strategy including a second assay for rubella antibodies (inhibition of hemagglutination) after a positive one. This strategy is 10% more sensitive than a single test. Nevertheless, the cost of one case of congenital rubella prevented by this strategy is 13.3 higher than the cost of a case prevented by a strategy including the vaccination of boys and girls at the age of 2 years and of girls at the age of 12. Thus, the vaccination strategy is a priority for rubella prevention while the multiplication of the screening test is not a priority.

The association in many populations of the fat content of the diet and frequency of ischemic heart disease is mentioned. The author gives a summary of papers showing on one hand, a high correlation between the content of the diet in saturated fatty acids and ischemic heart disease morbidity and mortality rates, and, on the other hand, the protective effect of a change towards more polyunsaturated fatty acids in the diet. Several teams of Belgian researchers have recently published new facts on this matter. In the Northern Flemish speaking part of the country, saturated fatty acids have been partially replaced by polyunsaturated fatty acids from vegetable sources. This change has been followed by a general decrease of ischemic heart disease incidence, prevalence and mortality rates. In the Southern French speaking part of the country, the alimentary changes have not occurred so far; the ischemic heart disease morbidity and mortality rates stand higher.

This paper compares the RBE of a neutron beam produced by 50 MeV deuterons on beryllium [d(50)-Be] at the cyclotron CYCLONE of Louvain-La-Neuve and of a neutron beam produced by 34 MeV protons on beryllium [p(34)-Be] of the Hôpital Régional d'Orléans. Early intestinal tolerance in mice was choosen as biological criterium; it is derived from LD50 determination after single and fractionated abdominal irradiation. For d(50)-Be neutrons, RBE was 1.8 +/- 0.2 (with respect to 60Co gamma-rays) for a single fraction. It increases up to 2.1 +/- 0.2 for an irradiation in 2 fractions (3.5 h interval) and reaches 2.5 +/- 0.3, 2.7 +/- 0.3 and 2.5 +/- 0.3 for irradiations in 10 fractions (7 and 3.5 h interval) and 20 fractions (3.5 h interval) respectively. RBE values observed for p(34)-Be neutrons (with respect to 60Co gamma-rays) are not significantly different. For a single fraction RBE = 1.7 +/- 0.2 and for 2 fractions (3.5 h interval) RBE = 2.0 +2- 0.2.