BACKGROUND Research investigating the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and blood pressure (BP) during pregnancy is limited and its underlying pathway is unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate the mediators of the association between educational level as an indicator of the SES and BP in early and mid-pregnancy among Japanese women. METHODS Nine hundred and twenty-thre...

introduction: cochlear implantation can facilitate the development of communication skills in children with profound hearing loss. the objectives of our study were to determine the average ages at suspicion and diagnosis of hearing loss, amplification, intervention, and performing the cochlear implantation and to investigate the effects of the parents’ level of education and economic circumstan...

introduction: the family of each hearing-impaired child has its own cultural, social, educational, and financial background, and its own special needs. the objectives of our study were to explore the information and support needs of parents of children with severe-to-profound hearing impairment and to investigate the effects of the parents’ level of education and economic status on the score at...

drug and health literacy is a key determinant of health outcomes. there are several tools to assess drug and health literacy. the objective of this article is to determine drug literacy level and its relationships with other factors using a single screening tool. a cross- sectional survey was conducted among 1104 people in qazvin province, iran. based on the proportional-to-size method, partici...

objective: this study assessed the influence of maternal request on elective cesarean rate and related factors in maternity hospitals in tehran. materials and method: this cross sectional descriptive analytic study was performed via a two-step random sampling technique, using data from 824 pregnant women who attended the maternity hospitals in tehran in 2001. a questionnaire covering past and p...

OBJECTIVES People of low socioeconomic status are shorter than those of high socioeconomic status. The first two years of life being critical for height development, we hypothesized that a low socioeconomic status is associated with a slower linear growth in early childhood. We studied maternal educational level (high, mid-high, mid-low, and low) as a measure of socioeconomic status and its ass...

As the population of orphans grows in AIDS-affected settings, recent studies describe a heightened risk of HIV and sexual risk behaviours among adolescent orphans compared to their non-orphaned peers. This study explores the role of education in explaining the excess sexual risk previously documented among unmarried female orphans in urban Zimbabwe. School attendance and attainment were assesse...

To assess teratogenic effects of cocaine exposure and maternal psychological distress on birth outcomes, we conducted a longitudinal prospective study of 415 infants (218 cocaine-exposed--CE, 197 nonexposed--NE). Drug exposure was determined through a combination of maternal self-report, urine, and meconium screens. Maternal psychological distress postpartum was evaluated through a standardized...

The objective of the present study was to investigate the inter-relationships between nutritional status (past and current nutrition), brain development, and scholastic achievement (SA) of Chilean high-school graduates from high and low intellectual quotient (IQ) and socio-economic status (SES) (mean age 18.0 (SD 0.9) years). Results showed that independently of SES, high-school graduates with ...

BACKGROUND Despite global declaration of the right to life as a fundamental human right and substantial progress in reducing childhood mortality, unacceptably high number of children still die before their fifth birthday every day. Different factors have been studied and implicated for under-five mortality with mixed results. Mortality studies in the current study sites were lacking. Therefore,...