Obstetrics & gynaecology

How does diet before and during pregnancy affect your child?

Every mother wants to have the healthiest child she can, and new research shows that the nutritional status of the mother during pregnancy can affect outcomes for the baby—with male and female offspring affected differently.

Immunology

Smoking shown to have long-term effects on the immune system

Like other factors such as age, sex, and genetics, smoking has a major impact on immune responses. This is the finding recently made by a team of scientists at the Institut Pasteur using the Milieu Intérieur cohort of 1,000 ...

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Body mass index

The body mass index (BMI), or Quetelet index, is a controversial statistical measurement which compares a person's weight and height. Though it does not actually measure the percentage of body fat, it may be a useful tool to estimate a healthy body weight based on how tall a person is. Due to its ease of measurement and calculation, it is the most widely used diagnostic tool to identify weight problem within a population including: underweight, overweight and obesity. It was invented between 1830 and 1850 by the Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet during the course of developing "social physics". Body mass index is defined as the individual's body weight divided by the square of his or her height. The formulae universally used in medicine produce a unit of measure of kg/m2. BMI can also be determined using a BMI chart, which displays BMI as a function of weight (horizontal axis) and height (vertical axis) using contour lines for different values of BMI or colours for different BMI categories.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA