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Background: As physical activity can prevent overweight and promote general health, the aim was to investigate the amount of physical activity among adolescent and young adult women and men with intellectual disability (ID), compared to age-matched control groups without intellectual disability. A further aim was to examine whether physical activity level was associated with the body mass index (BMI). Materials and methods: Fifty-two adolescent and young adult women and men with intellectual disability and 48 without intellectual disability, between the ages 16 and 20 years, BMIs ranging from 16.3 to 50.3 kg/m2, were measured for number of steps taken with a pedometer for five consecutive days (Sunday-Thursday). Results: The only group to meet recommendations regarding number of steps (10,000-12,000/day) was women without intellectual disability. No significant associations were found between total number of steps taken and BMI. Conclusion: As the majority of adolescents and young adults with intellectual disability, especially women, did not reach recommended activity levels regardless of their BMIs, this call for broad measures to increase physical activity.

Examined whether changes in format of mathematics items in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) had any effect on gender differences in performance using a Swedish sample of 8,851 sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. Results show no significant changes in gender differences when item format is altered. (SLD)

Several guanidines and guanidinylated peptides have substantial potential as therapeutics, but efficient guanidinylation reagents are vital for easy access to these compounds. Presently, pyrazole-1-carboxamidine type reagents are commonly used in the transformations of amines into corresponding guanidines. Here, we report a comparative study of the utility of 1 H -triazole-1-[ N , N '-bis( tert -butoxycarbonyl)]carboxamidine, which was synthesized in two steps and readily upscaled to gram amounts. It exhibited excellent performance in solution-phase reactions, rapidly converting a set of representative aliphatic primary and unhindered secondary amines as well as aniline into the corresponding bis( tert -butoxycarbonyl)-protected guanidines. To enable a direct assessment of the reactivity of guanidinylation reagents, conversions were performed in deuterated solvents ( d 7 -DMF or d 8 -THF), allowing for continuous analysis of the reaction mixtures by 1 H and 13 C NMR. Likewise, 1 H -triazole-1-[ N , N '-bis( tert -butoxycarbonyl)]carboxamidine proved to be a versatile reagent in solid-phase conversions, for example, a resin-bound test peptide (KFFKFFK) was fully guanidinylated in only 2 h by using 2 equivalents of the reagent per free amino group. Also, 1 H -triazole-1-[ N , N '-bis( tert -butoxycarbonyl)]carboxamidine proved capable of completely guanidinylating more sterically hindered N-terminal residues (e.g., N -methyl amino acids or a peptoid) in resin-bound peptides. Its superior reactivity and stability demonstrated under heating conditions make 1 H -triazole-1-[ N , N '-bis( tert -butoxycarbonyl)]carboxamidine a valuable guanidinylation reagent both in solution- and solid-phase synthesis.