This week in PLoS Medicine: Adult obesity; Assessing child development; Breast cancer; and more!

Read the new papers published in PLoS Medicine this week, including five Research Articles: The first genotyped children from the ALSPAC birth cohort and shows an association between greater early infancy gains in weight and length, and genetic markers for adult obesity risk. The second evaluates the reliability and validity of an assessment tool for evaluating child development in rural African settings. The third analyzes a case-control study among Afghan refugees in Pakistan and finds that a G6PD (glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase) “Mediterranean” type deficiency confers substantial protection against Plasmodium vivax malaria. The fourth evaluates the association between blood sugar levels and risk of coronary heart disease in people who do not have diabetes. And the fifth evaluates the prognostic significance of immunohistochemical subtype classification in more than 10,000 breast cancer cases with early disease, and examines the influence of a patient’s survival time on the prediction of future survival. The fifth Research Article is also discussed in a related Perspective.

Also published this week, is the May Editorial in which the PLoS Medicine editors ask whether journal publishing is an efficient enough mechanism for information sharing in the wake of the SARS epidemic and the H1N1 pandemic as well as a Research in Translation piece that discusses the epidemiology and care of adolescents undertaking nonsuicidal self-injury, also called “deliberate self-harm.”

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