Other important factor explaining the delay in growth could be the transformation into energy of a portion of nutrients from digestion of food consumed to cope with chemical stress that constitutes the exposure to agricultural pesticides.
Consequently, study results may potentially be biased when staging constitutes the exposure or a confounding factor, and this may lead to incorrect conclusions.
Therefore, in further reading of the text, the following questions were added in the dialogue with the text: What constitutes the exposure and why does it occur?
In the studies of outcome research, practice patterns, (which constitute the exposure in the proposed model), range from the use of medication, diagnostic tests and therapeutic procedures to the length of hospital stay, transfer to other facilities and/or scheduled physicians visits.
Personal income per month was categorized as a three category variable with more than 35,000Rwf (60USD), between 17,500-35,000Rwf (30-60 USD) and less than 17,500Rwf (30 USD) and further, grouped into earning 17,500Rwf or more per month as the reference category and less than 17,500Rwf per month constituted the exposure category.
Lifecourse epidemiological research is traditionally articulated around three main hypotheses, namely that the timing of socioeconomic conditions determines their relation to later health (critical-phase), that low SES affects health proportionally to its duration (accumulation), and that changes in SES constitute the exposure associated with health (social mobility) [ 32].
Maternal sociodemographics (ie, region of residency, age, educational level, mother tongue, working status at time of conception, previous children, marital status and unplanned pregnancy) and lifestyle characteristics (ie, smoking status before and during pregnancy and alcohol consumption after awareness of pregnancy) constituted the exposure variables.
The output of the model is the concentration of oil (surrogate hydrocarbons-naphthalene) in these four media, which constitutes the potential exposure to receptors.
ECG parameters during exposure were analyzed as baseline (120 sec of data collected every 5 min for 1 hr while in the whole-body chamber immediately before the beginning of exposure) and hours 0 4 during exposure (120 sec of data collected every 5 min for 4 hr while in the whole-body chamber during exposure constituting the entire exposure period between ~ 0830 hours and 1230 hours).
First, single event noise levels (e.g., maximum levels, sound exposure level) constitute the noise exposure variables in place of long-term energy equivalent measures (e.g., 24-hour Leq or Ldn).
However, considering that water is now established as a significant residual source of Pb exposure and that baby bottles are often prepared with tap water, the ingestion of formula made in this way probably constitutes the worst case exposure, as it involves both the dissolved and the particulate Pb in tap water.
