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Barker's "fetal origin hypothesis" advocates that the diseases in later life originate through adaptations that fetus makes when it is undernourished. These adaptations, whether cardiovascular, metabolic, or endocrine, permanently change the structure, and functions of the body, and pave the road to chronic killer diseases in later life, such as; coronary heart diseases, related disorders, stroke, diabetes, and hypertension. The main objective of the study, both prospective, and retrospective, covering the subjects from 0 to 1 year, and 3 to 15 years, respectively, is to test the Barker "fetal origin hypothesis" that nutrition in early life does influence the disease pattern in later life. The research is specifically designed to study the relationship between infant body size, placental weight, blood pressure, and lipid profile in late infancy; and whether or not the relationship between high blood pressure, and low birthweight is initiated in uterus, or during the infancy. The prospective studies were carried out in Prince Salman Bin Abdulaziz Hospital in Riyadh, KSA. The sampling was performed systematically. Every fifth child born in the delivery room was selected in the obstetric ward. A total of 1026 neonates were included in the prospective studies. The retrospective studies were conducted in Deraya Primary Health Care Centre, and data were collected from the medical record department, which included 1505 subjects, aged 3 to 15 years. The babies with major congenital malformations were excluded both studies included questionnaires, anthropometric measurements, and critical evaluation of haematological and biochemical parameters. The data collected, both prospective and retrospective and retrospective studies, were categorised, analysed, and statistically interpreted by using the Statistical Package for Social Science SPSS/PC+V9.0. Normal distributions of data were confirmed by using the Kolmogorow-Smirnow Test. In all cases, significance was assumed at P < 0.05. The major findings do support Barker's epidemiological data, and evidences. Although, it is still somewhat too early, and premature to confirm these findings, due to the length of period covered, the data presented, both prospective and retrospective, do point out, and lead to the following major conclusions: Chronic diseases are being imprinted "Programmed" in feto-placental unit during pregnancy, and infancy, there is indeed a strong association between birthweight, especially, low birthweight, and placental weight, blood pressure, lipid metabolism in early infancy, and in childhood. Low birthweight, <2500gms is strongly associated with elevated systolic blood pressure, and low birthweight infants, if survived, are predisposed to inevitable disabilities of all kinds, and chronic diseases in later life.

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Concern is mounting over the increase in prevalence and severity of overweight and obesity in children worldwide. Intrauterine life has been identified as a critical period for the development of overweight or obesity and other related chronic diseases. Prenatal exposure to maternal cigarette smoke (PEMCS) has consistently emerged as an important risk factor for excess weight in the offspring and is a targetable behaviour for prevention strategies. This study examines first the relationship between PEMCS and overweight status of children at 10 years of age and second, whether PEMCS is associated with distinct longitudinal BMI trajectories. Analyses include multivariate and multinomial logistic regression and longitudinal group based modeling methods. PEMCS was found to be a significant risk factor for overweight in children independent of birth weight and catch-up growth. However, PEMCS was not associated with BMI trajectory membership. Our results lend support to the paradigm of in-utero excess weight prevention.

Bibliography: leaves 237-246. / The concept of invariance in hypothesis testing is discussed for purposes of target detection. Invariant tests are proposed and analysed in two contexts. The first involves the use of cyclic permutation invariance as a solution to detecting targets with unknown location in noise. An invariance condition is used to eliminate the target location parameter, and a uniformly most powerful test developed for the reduced data. The test is compared with conventional solutions, and shown to be more powerfu. The difference however is slight, justifying the simpler formulations. This conclusion continues to hold even when additional unknown noise parameters are introduced.

The objective of this dissertation is to verify and explain the forward exchange rate unbiasedness hypothesis in the foreign exchange market. Since in most of the cases the unbiasedness hypothesis fails to hold, we try to provide three different explanations of this puzzling behavior in the three essays. The first essay tries to resolve the forward premium puzzle by addressing the model misspecification issue and thereby adding a time-varying risk premium term in the percentage change specification. The risk premium term is modeled using the GARCH-M representation and the model is estimated by applying a GARCH (1, 1) specification. The second essay attributes the failure of the unbiasedness hypothesis to hold to the nonstationarity of the spot and forward exchange rate. It verifies the existence of a cointegrating relationship between the spot and the forward exchange rates and thus specifies an Error Correction Model to better capture the relation between the spot and the forward rates. Further, a cointegrating or the existence of a long run relationship between the spot and forward exchange rates and the domestic and foreign interest rates is tested. It can be viewed as a robustness check where we ensure whether the cointegrated exchange rates are still related in the long run with the inclusion of the interest rates. The objective of the third essay is to apply the generalized method of moments (GMM) to test the unbiasedness hypothesis in the foreign exchange market. Empirical evidence suggests that the spot and forward rates are nonstationary with unit roots and are cointegrated. Cointegration further suggests that the changes in the spot rate can be modeled by an Error Correction Model. The third essay explicitly derives an ECM from the levels specification and uses the GMM estimation technique to test the unbiasedness hypothesis.

This paper examined the claims postulated by the somatic marker hypothesis and compares those claims to the current evidence surrounding the neural basis of alexithymia. The results were then compared to see if they contradict or have a distinct localisation in the brain separate from those behavioural brain regions hypothesized by the somatic marker hypothesis. It was concluded that the somatic marker hypothesis and the neural basis for alexithymia share certain regions of interest, primarily the amygdala and insula, but also potentially the anterior cingulate cortex.

U.S. money market securities have been found to exhibit behavior consistent with preferred habitat for liquidity around year-ends (Griffiths and Winters (1997, 2004)). In particular, repurchase agreement and commercial paper yields tend to increase when the security begins to mature across the end of the year, and return to normal levels after the year-end obligations have been paid but before the calendar year-end. The competing hypothesis, window dressing by financial intermediaries around disclosure dates, requires that the increase in yields be sustained until after the turn of the year. This study is aimed at finding whether the behavior of international money markets around year-ends and quarter-ends is more consistent with preferred habitat for liquidity or window dressing. This is done by analyzing changes in LIBOR for different currencies around quarter-ends. A second part of the study considers the effect of preferred habitat on the term structure of short-term interest rates. The expectations hypothesis of the term structure posits that future expected interest rates are implied by the current term structure. Empirical research suggests that the expectations hypothesis often does not hold, especially at the short end of the term structure. Preferred habitat for liquidity in short-term rates may be one of the reasons for the failure of expectations. The same LIBOR data set is used to test for the expectations in the presence of preferred habitat for liquidity. The empirical results of this study suggest that preferred habitat for liquidity in the short-term rates around quarter-ends and year-ends is not responsible for the failure of the expectations hypothesis in the data.

Overall this thesis explores the age pattern of consumption of the Canadian elderly. Theoretical applications of the Life Cycle Hypothesis suggest that these consumption patterns should be constant in real terms as individuals age. However, most empirical work observes a declining pattern of consumption with age and health status. This thesis attempts to resolve this difference. The first chapter uses data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey. Using a comprehensive measure of health status, it finds that poor health explains the reduction in consumption (and its marginal utility), with most of the effect occurring among individuals whose income is above the median. The second chapter uses data from the Canadian Survey of Household Spending to explore the effect on non-healthcare consumption of falling into ill health. It finds that the effect on non-healthcare consumption varies by the level of a household's saving or dissaving. Non-healthcare consumption decreases by roughly 2.25% of after-tax income for those households that dissave 10% of their current year after-tax income or less. As households dissave larger and larger amount, however, the effect first becomes less negative, and then more positive. The third chapter develops a theoretical approach to calculating a life annuity value that produces optimal levels of annual consumption that reflect changes in utility based on health status and age. Relative to an annuity that produces a constant real stream of income for a healthy 65 year old male, the optimal stream of income starts roughly 2% higher and drops by 2% to 3% by age 80 and by a further 2% or so by age 95. This pattern of consumption is roughly equivalent to ignoring 15 to 20 basis points of annual inflation relative to an annuity that is fully indexed to inflation. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Caregivers of elderly people may make errors in administering medicine. This study aims to determine a more effective method of presenting prescription instructions to caregivers and to determine if the multiple resource hypothesis holds in the context of prescription instructions by evaluating the effect a voice prescription label (that gives audio instructions) has on comprehension and memory of a drug regimen under varying training level, task complexity, and instruction format. In performing a multivariate analyses of variance on data collected among formal and informal caregivers, training level, task complexity, sound condition, and instruction format were found to significantly affect caregivers' memory and comprehension. There is evidence that audio instructions and the matrix format reduce errors. These results could lead to the development of a Medication Scheduling Management System that would organize medicines according to administration time and incorporate decision rules to determine what to do if a dose is missed.