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We estimated the trends and correlates of vaccine hesitancy and its association with subsequent vaccine uptake among 5,458 adults in the United States. Participants belonged to the Communities, Households, and SARS-CoV-2 Epidemiology COVID (CHASING COVID) Cohort, a national longitudinal study. Trends and correlates of vaccine hesitancy were examined longitudinally in 8 interview rounds from October 2020 to July 2021. We also estimated the association between willingness to vaccinate and subsequent vaccine uptake through July 2021. Vaccine delay and refusal decreased from 51% and 8% in October 2020 to 8% and 6% in July 2021, respectively. Compared with non-Hispanic (NH) White participants, NH Black and Hispanic participants had higher adjusted odds ratios (aOR) for both vaccine delay (for NH Black, aOR = 2.0 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.5, 2.7), and for Hispanic, 1.3 (95% CI: 1.0, 1.7)) and vaccine refusal (for NH Black, aOR = 2.5 (95% CI: 1.8, 3.6), and for Hispanic, 1.4 (95% CI: 1.0, 2.0)) in June 2021. COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, compared with vaccine-willingness, was associated with lower odds of subsequent vaccine uptake (for vaccine delayers, aOR = 0.15, 95% CI: 0.13, 0.18; for vaccine refusers, aOR = 0.02; 95% CI: 0.01, 0.03), adjusted for sociodemographic factors and COVID-19 history. Vaccination awareness and distribution efforts should focus on vaccine delayers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence on the role of early-life adversity in later-life memory decline is conflicting. We investigated the relationships between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and memory performance and rate of decline over a 10-year follow-up among middle-aged and older adults in England. Data were from biennial interviews with 5,223 participants aged 54 years or older in the population-representative English Longitudinal Study of Ageing from 2006/2007 to 2016/2017. We examined self-reports of 9 ACEs prior to age 16 years that related to abuse, household dysfunction, and separation from family. Memory was assessed at each time point as immediate and delayed recall of 10 words. Using linear mixed-effects models with person-specific random intercepts and slopes and adjusted for baseline age, participants' baseline age squared, sex, ethnicity, and childhood socioeconomic factors, we observed that most individual and cumulative ACE exposures had null to weakly negative associations with memory function and rate of decline over the 10-year follow-up. Having lived in residential or foster care was associated with lower baseline memory (adjusted β = −0.124 standard deviation units; 95% confidence interval: −0.273, −0.025) but not memory decline. Our findings suggest potential long-term impacts of residential or foster care on memory and highlight the need for accurate and detailed exposure measures when studying ACEs in relation to later-life cognitive outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple imputation has entered mainstream practice for the analysis of incomplete data. We have used it extensively in a large Australian longitudinal cohort study, the Victorian Adolescent Health Cohort Study (1992–2008). Although we have endeavored to follow best practices, there is little published advice on this, and we have not previously examined the extent to which variations in our approach might lead to different results. Here, we examined sensitivity of analytical results to imputation decisions, investigating choice of imputation method, inclusion of auxiliary variables, omission of cases with excessive missing data, and approaches for imputing highly skewed continuous distributions that are analyzed as dichotomous variables. Overall, we found that decisions made about imputation approach had a discernible but rarely dramatic impact for some types of estimates. For model-based estimates of association, the choice of imputation method and decisions made to build the imputation model had little effect on results, whereas estimates of overall prevalence and prevalence stratified by subgroup were more sensitive to imputation method and settings. Multiple imputation by chained equations gave more plausible results than multivariate normal imputation for prevalence estimates but appeared to be more susceptible to numerical instability related to a highly skewed variable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]