In 1949, Priscilla White published "Pregnancy Complicating Diabetes," which described the results and implications of a fifteen-year study about pregnant diabetic women. Published in the American Journal of Medicine, the article details possible causes of and ways to prevent the high fetal mortality rate associated with pregnant diabetic women. Diabetes is a disease in which the body's ability ...

EPIDEMIOLOGY Globally, 3.7 million children died within the neonatal period in 2004 with 25-45% of deaths occurring within the first day after in 2004.2 Over 50% of the world's infant mortality occurs in the developing and tropical countries and is related to the prevalent high neonatal mortality rate.1 A similar trend was observed in maternal mortality in the sub-Saharan region with mortality ...

OBJECTIVE Caesarean section was initially performed to save the lives of the mother and/or her baby. Caesarean section rates have risen substantially worldwide over the past decades. In this study, we set out to compile all available caesarean section rates worldwide at the country level, and to identify the appropriate caesarean section rate at the population level associated with the minimal ...

Editorials 403 Although 2015 is only three years away, many countries are not on track to reach the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), particularly goals 4 and 5, which call for reductions in child and maternal mortality rates. Targeted interventions are needed for rapid progress to take place. However, reliable estimates of the numbers, causes and determinants of death are nee...

BACKGROUND Model-based estimates of the global proportions of maternal deaths that are in HIV-infected women range from 7% to 21%, and the effects of HIV on the risk of maternal death is highly uncertain. We used longitudinal data from the Analysing Longitudinal Population-based HIV/AIDS data on Africa (ALPHA) network to estimate the excess mortality associated with HIV during pregnancy and the...

BACKGROUND India has made large strides in reducing maternal mortality ratio and neonatal mortality rate, yet care-seeking behavior for appropriate care is still a challenge. We conducted a qualitative study to understand the process of recognition and care-seeking for maternal and newborn illnesses in rural India where a health intervention through women's self-help groups (SHG) to improve mat...

Between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio for sub–Saharan Africa as a whole fell by roughly 45 percent [1]. Unfortunately, this decline has not been uniformly distributed across the region. A number of countries have shown little or no progress and continue to experience mortality rates that rank among the highest in the world. In countries such as Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Chad,...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Measuring maternal mortality in developing countries poses a major challenge. In Nepal, vital registration is extremely deficient. Currently available methods to measure maternal mortality, such as the sisterhood method, pose problems with respect to validity, precision, cost and time. We conducted this field study to test a community-based method (the motherhood method)...

BACKGROUND Only a few studies have investigated the link between human resources for health and health outcomes, and they arrive at different conclusions. We tested the strength and significance of density of human resources for health with improved methods and a new WHO dataset. METHODS We did cross-country multiple regression analyses with maternal mortality rate, infant mortality rate, and...