BACKGROUND Maternal mortality rates vary significantly from region to region. Interventions such as early and planned antenatal care attendance and facility delivery with skilled health workers can potentially reduce maternal mortality rates. Several factors can be attributed to antenatal care attendance, or lack thereof, including the cost of health care services. The aim of this study was to ...

Background: The timing of maternal weight change in pregnancy may be an important determinant of birth weight. The objective of this study was to measure weight gain patterns from early pregnancy until delivery, and to examine the relationship between prenatal weight gain and low birth weight. Methods: A total of 500 pregnant women within 15-20 days of conception, with confirmed pregnancies and...

The end of the “one-child” policy in China has brought the discussion of how much birth control policies have actually affected women’s childbearing behavior back into the spotlight. Some people suggest that birth control policies explain most of the fertility decline in China, but others believe that socioeconomic development has also played a decisive role. To shed light on these questions, i...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether the timing of excessive maternal weight gain in a cohort of women following current guidelines for healthy living during pregnancy affects neonatal adiposity at birth. METHODS One hundred seventy-two healthy women who were at least 18 years old with body mass indexes (BMIs) of at least 18.5 were recruited between 16 weeks and 20 weeks of gestation. The cohort fol...

BACKGROUND Timing of birth is a major determinant of newborn health. African American women are at increased risk for early birth, particularly via the inflammatory pathway. Variants of the IL1RN gene, which encode the interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra) protein, are implicated in early birth. The biological pathways linking these variables remain unclear. Evidence also suggests that inf...

BACKGROUND Epidemiologic studies indicate that infections in early childhood may protect against pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). METHODS We identified 3,402 ALL cases among children 0 to 5 years of age using the California Cancer Registry. From California birth records we randomly selected controls in a 20:1 ratio and frequency matched them to cases by birth year. We investigate...

A model is proposed in which women change the timing of childbearing and duration of time not working following childbearing in order to mitigate any adverse effects of the demographic cycle upon their lifetime wages. The authors explore the reduced-form empirical implications of their model and estimate the importance of the responses using data from three cohorts of the National Longitudinal...

BACKGROUND The molecular components determining the timing for birth remain an incompletely characterized aspect of reproduction, with important conceptual and therapeutic ramifications for management of preterm, post-term and arrested labor. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS To test the hypothesis that oxytocin mediates circadian regulation of birth, we evaluated parturition timing following sh...

BACKGROUND A large literature has indicated a robust association between birth spacing and child survival, but evidence on the association of birth timing with physical growth in low and middle income countries (LMICs) remains limited. METHODS AND RESULTS Data from 153 cross-sectional Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) across 61 LMICs conducted between 1990 and 2011 were combined to assess ...

BACKGROUND Previous research suggests that prenatal maternal stress (PNMS) impacts birth outcomes, but many human studies cannot distinguish between the effects of different types of stressors or examine effects of exposure timing on outcomes. OBJECTIVES Our goal was to determine how timing and severity of exposure during pregnancy to objective and subjective stress due to a natural disaster ...