Article type: Review article Background & aim: Prenatal care is a key strategy for achieving public health goals, primary healthcare objectives, and the Millennium Development Goals. The aim of this study was to investigate the factors influencing the use of prenatal care services in order to design suitable interventions and promote the use of these services. Methods: In this systematic quanti...

BACKGROUND Alcohol consumption among pregnant women is a public health concern, considering its adverse outcomes for both mother and the developing foetus. This study examined factors that facilitate prenatal alcohol consumption, knowledge of adverse outcomes of prenatal alcohol exposure and alcohol expenditure among pregnant women in an urban community in Ghana. METHODS In June 2014, a surve...

OBJECTIVE To provide obstetrical and genetic health care practitioners with guidelines and recommendations for prenatal screening, diagnosis, and obstetrical management of fetal open and closed neural tube defects (OCNTD). OPTIONS This review includes prenatal screening and diagnostic techniques currently being used for the detection of OCNTD including maternal serum alpha fetoprotein screeni...

In utero is a critical period of human development during which parents act on children’s behalf in health investments. These investments may have a profound impact on the life trajectory of a child. We investigate whether parents in Northern China who choose to carry the pregnancy to term allocate resources differently between their sons and daughters over the course of pregnancy after the sex...

Issues 4, 5 and 6 together are a triple issue with focus on maternal health. The is trilogy of sorts including papers about care perceptions for prenatal, pregnancy and...

INTRODUCTION Routine prenatal human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) screening provides a critical opportunity to diagnose HIV infection, begin chronic care, and prevent mother-to-child transmission. However, little is known about the prevalence of prenatal HIV testing in the US-Mexico border region. We explored the correlation between prenatal HIV testing and sociodemographic, health behavior, and...

BACKGROUND Exposures during the prenatal period may have lasting effects on maternal and child health outcomes. To better understand the effects of the in utero environment on children's short- and long-term health, large representative pregnancy cohorts with comprehensive information on a broad range of environmental influences (including biological and behavioral) and the ability to link to p...

This is a comparative and descriptive study of adolescent mothers who were attended in three maternities of the public health system and three private maternities in a city in São Paulo, Brazil, between 2000 and 2002. This study aimed to compare the profile of mothers attended in both systems. The database of Ribeirão Preto was used and 5,286 adolescent mothers between 10 and 19 years old were ...

OBJECTIVE To measure the effect of access to prenatal care on unauthorized and low-income, new legal permanent resident immigrant women and their offspring. METHODS We used a difference-in-differences design that leverages the staggered rollout of Emergency Medicaid Plus by county from 2008 to 2013 as a natural experiment to estimate the effect on health service utilization for women and heal...

Objective: To provide a Canadian consensus document with recommendations on prenatal screening for and diagnosis of fetal aneuploidy (e .g ., Down syndrome and trisomy 18) in twin pregnancies . Options: The process of prenatal screening and diagnosis in twin pregnancies is complex . This document reviews the options available to pregnant women and the challenges specific to screening and diagno...