| 1. |
- Coelho, Vera, et al.
(författare)
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Preschool practices in Sweden, Portugal, and the United States
- 2021
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Ingår i: Early Childhood Research Quarterly. - : Elsevier BV. - 0885-2006 .- 1873-7706. ; 55, s. 79-96
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Across countries, there are important differences related to the goals, organization, and educational philosophies of care provided to young children prior to formal schooling. Those differences are likely reflected in the classroom practices and teacher-child interactions within a country's early childhood education and care (ECEC) classrooms. This study aims to evaluate the within-country relevance of two classroom observation measures primarily based on a behavioral count approach focused on teacher and child behaviors; and to examine preschool practices in Sweden, Portugal, and the U.S., as they reflect each country's ECEC goals, organization, and educational philosophies. Participants are 78 preschool settings in Sweden, 42 in Portugal, and 168 in the U.S. Results show that the measures targeted culturally-relevant behaviors and provided inter-rater reliability for the behavior count variables in the three countries. Future collaborations may address additional culturally-specific variables. The behavioral descriptions yielded by combining behavioral counts of the measures are analyzed by researchers from the relevant country for insights to the country's values related to early childhood as well as current debates regarding care for children. Measures that provide comprehensive descriptions of classroom settings and apply minimal external or comparative value judgments on the behaviors observed are of practical utility for collaborative international work.
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| 2. |
- Silventoinen, Karri, et al.
(författare)
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Education in twins and their parents across birth cohorts over 100 years : an individual-level pooled analysis of 42 twin cohorts
- 2017
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Ingår i: Twin Research and Human Genetics. - Stockholm : Karolinska Institutet, Dept of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics. - 1832-4274 .- 1839-2628.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Whether monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins differ from each other in a variety of phenotypes is important for genetic twin modeling and for inferences made from twin studies in general. We analyzed whether there were differences in individual, maternal and paternal education between MZ and DZ twins in a large pooled dataset. Information was gathered on individual education for 218,362 adult twins from 27 twin cohorts (53% females; 39% MZ twins), and on maternal and paternal education for 147,315 and 143,056 twins respectively, from 28 twin cohorts (52% females; 38% MZ twins). Together, we had information on individual or parental education from 42 twin cohorts representing 19 countries. The original education classifications were transformed to education years and analyzed using linear regression models. Overall, MZ males had 0.26 (95% CI [0.21, 0.31]) years and MZ females 0.17 (95% CI [0.12, 0.21]) years longer education than DZ twins. The zygosity difference became smaller in more recent birth cohorts for both males and females. Parental education was somewhat longer for fathers of DZ twins in cohorts born in 1990-1999 (0.16 years, 95% CI [0.08, 0.25]) and 2000 or later (0.11 years, 95% CI [0.00, 0.22]), compared with fathers of MZ twins. The results show that the years of both individual and parental education are largely similar in MZ and DZ twins. We suggest that the socio-economic differences between MZ and DZ twins are so small that inferences based upon genetic modeling of twin data are not affected.
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| 3. |
- Wang, Yunzhang, et al.
(författare)
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Comprehensive longitudinal study of epigenetic mutations in aging
- 2019
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Ingår i: Clinical Epigenetics. - : BioMed Central. - 1868-7083 .- 1868-7075. ; 11
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: The role of DNA methylation in aging has been widely studied. However, epigenetic mutations, here defined as aberrant methylation levels compared to the distribution in a population, are less understood. Hence, we investigated longitudinal accumulation of epigenetic mutations, using 994 blood samples collected at up to five time points from 375 individuals in old ages.Results: We verified earlier cross-sectional evidence on the increase of epigenetic mutations with age, and identified important contributing factors including sex, CD19+ B cells, genetic background, cancer diagnosis, and technical artifacts. We further classified epigenetic mutations into High/Low Methylation Outliers (HMO/LMO) according to their changes in methylation, and specifically studied methylation sites (CpGs) that were prone to mutate (frequently mutated CpGs). We validated four epigenetically mutated CpGs using pyrosequencing in 93 samples. Furthermore, by using twins, we concluded that the age-related accumulation of epigenetic mutations was not related to genetic factors, hence driven by stochastic or environmental effects.Conclusions: Here we conducted a comprehensive study of epigenetic mutation and highlighted its important role in aging process and cancer development.
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