BACKGROUND Poorly spaced pregnancies have been documented worldwide to result in adverse maternal and child health outcomes. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends a minimum inter-birth interval of 33 months between two consecutive live births in order to reduce the risk of adverse maternal and child health outcomes. However, birth spacing practices in many developing countries, includi...

OBJECTIVE To re-evaluate the causal effect of interpregnancy interval on adverse birth outcomes, on the basis that previous studies relying on between mother comparisons may have inadequately adjusted for confounding by maternal risk factors. DESIGN Retrospective cohort study using conditional logistic regression (matching two intervals per mother so each mother acts as her own control) to mo...

Human birth interval length is indicative of the level of parental investment that a child will receive: a short interval following birth means that parental resources must be split with a younger sibling during a period when the older sibling remains highly dependent on their parents. From a life-history theoretical perspective, it is likely that there are evolved mechanisms that serve to maxi...

BACKGROUND The distribution of birth intervals can be used to draw attention to important characteristics of dynamics of fertility process. The main objective of this paper is to examine the effects of socioeconomic, demographic and proximate determinants on the length of birth intervals of women of Bangladesh and also to see whether the effects are changed over the years. METHODS Birth inter...

OBJECTIVE We seek to expand on a biopsychosocial framework underlying the etiology of excess preterm birth experienced by African-American women by exploring short inter-pregnancy intervals as a partial explanatory factor. DESIGN We conducted a qualitative analyses of published studies that met specified criteria for assessing the association of inter-pregnancy interval and preterm birth. M...

OBJECTIVE To assess the extent to which women received contraceptive services within 90 days after birth at their first or subsequent visits and whether contraceptive provision was associated with optimal interpregnancy intervals. METHOD We linked California's 2008 Birth Statistical Master File with Medicaid databases to build a cohort of women aged 15-44 years who had given birth in 2008 and...

BACKGROUND Short birth intervals are known to have negative effects on pregnancy outcomes. We analysed data from a large population surveillance system in rural Bangladesh to identify predictors of short birth interval and determine consequences of short intervals on pregnancy outcomes. METHODS The study was conducted in three districts of Bangladesh - Bogra, Moulavibazar and Faridpur (popula...

OBJECTIVE This paper examines the association between birth intervals and infant and child mortality and nutritional status. METHODS Repeated analysis of retrospective survey data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program from 17 developing countries collected between 1990 and 1997 were used to examine these relationships. The key independent variable is the length of the precedin...