Reproductive health outcomes: Insights from experts and verbal autopsies

Potential and limits of verbal autopsies.

The idea of assessing causes of death by retrospective interview is as old as medic cal statistics. In 17th century London, soccalled death searchers visited the houses of people who had died to make enquiries about the death, especially about communicable diseases. In the 19th century, modern systems of death registration saw the end of this practice in Europe; but in developing countries, whi...

Prospects for automated diagnosis of verbal autopsies

Verbal autopsy is a method for assessing probable causes of death from lay reporting of signs, symptoms and circumstances by family members or caregivers of a deceased person. Several methods of automated diagnoses of causes of death from standardized verbal autopsy questionnaires have been developed recently (Inter-VA, Tariff, Random Forest and King-Lu). Their performances have been assessed i...

Clinical Medicine Insights: Reproductive Health

Women with autoimmune diseases such as lupus, scleroderma, and vasculitis receiving cyclophosphamide for severe disease manifestations risk primary ovarian insufficiency (POI) due to gonadotoxicity of this therapy. In addition to loss of reproductive potential, POI is associated with increased risk of morbidity and mortality. Practitioners caring for women requiring gonadotoxic therapies should...

Symptom recall and the diagnostic accuracy of verbal autopsies

Reproductive health outcomes and pesticide exposure

This review provides evidence that non-organochlorine pesticides may cause deleterious reproductive outcomes. The most suggestive evidence is of an association between fetal growth outcomes and pesticide exposure. Of the ten studies that considered fetal growth outcomes, eight reported significant associations. Most of these positive associations were for birth weight, and were from well-design...