Positive affect items with positive wording cannot be used to assess depressive disorders in the Japanese population adequately, but this can be done with the corresponding negatively revised items.

BackgroundSchool health promotion has been shown to improve the lifestyle of students, but it remains unclear whether school-based programs can influence family health. We developed an innovative program that enables school children to act as change agents in promoting healthy lifestyles of their mothers. The objective of this study was to examine the effect of the child-initiated intervention on weight, physical activity and dietary habit of their mothers.MethodsA 12-month cluster randomized trial was conducted, with school as a cluster. Participants were mothers with grade 8 students, aged around 13 years, of 20 schools in Homagama, Sri Lanka. Students of the intervention group were trained by facilitators to acquire the ability to assess noncommunicable disease risk factors in their homes and take action to address them, whereas those of the comparison group received no intervention. Body weight, step count and lifestyle of their mothers were assessed at baseline and post-intervention. Multi-level multivariable linear regression and logistic regression were used to assess the effects of intervention on continuous and binary outcomes, respectively.ResultsOf 308 study participants, 261 completed the final assessment at 12 month. There was a significantly greater decrease of weight and increase of physical activity in the intervention group. The mean (95 % confidence interval) difference comparing the intervention group with the control group was −2.49 (−3.38 to −1.60) kg for weight and −0.99 (−1.40 to −0.58) kg/m2 for body mass index. The intervention group had a 3.25 (95 % confidence interval 1.87–5.62) times higher odds of engaging in adequate physical activity than the control group, and the former showed a greater number of steps than the latter after intervention. The intervention group showed a greater reduction of household purchase of biscuits and ice cream.ConclusionsA program to motivate students to act as change agents of family’s lifestyle was effective in decreasing weight and increasing physical activity of their mothers.Trial registrationSri Lanka Clinical Trials Registry SLCTR/2013/011.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12966-016-0369-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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As cancer mortality data is not available, a study regarding the real problem of cancer mortality is timely and urgent in Viet Nam. Therefore the aim of the present study was to calculate cancer mortality in the city of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh. The correlation between cancer mortality to incidence ratios and relative survival probabilities for 23 cancer sites was estimated according to SEER (1973-97), then cancer mortality was calculated from the cancer incidence and cancer survival for 25 cancer sites in each city. Cancer mortality rate for all cancer sites except skin (ASR per 100,000) was 103.9 for males and 52.4 for females in Hanoi, and 93.7 for males and 60.7 for females in Ho Chi Minh. For males, the five most common cancer deaths were cancers of the lung, liver, stomach, colon/rectum, and nasopharynx in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh. For females, cancer death in the cervix was uncommon in Hanoi but the most common site in Ho Chi Minh (ASR 2.2 VS. 14.2 per 100,000). The present findings are the first results of cancer mortality from Viet Nam and should be useful for further cancer control programs there.