Preterm birth (PTB) occurs among 1:11U.S. white women and 1:7.5 African American women and is a significant driver of racial disparities in infant mortality. Maternal stress is the most common clinical phenotype underlying spontaneous PTB. Specific patterns of stress and biological mediators driving PTB remain unclear. We examined the effect of childhood stress on birth timing among African Ame...

The rise in educational enrolment is often cited as a possible cause of the trend to later childbearing in developed societies but direct evidence of its contribution to the aggregate change in fertility tempo is scarce. We show that rising enrolment, resulting in later ages at the end of education, accounts for a substantial part of the upward shift in the mean age at first birth in the 1980s ...

We combine household survey data with event data on the timing and location of armed conflicts to examine the impact of Burundi’s civil war on children’s health status. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in the war’s timing across provinces and the exposure of children’s birth cohorts to the fighting. After controlling for province of residence, birth cohort, individual an...

The objective of this study was to learn how post-birth marriage among fragile families was related to child behavior problems by examining the (1) characteristics that predict postbirth marriage, (2) the relationship of various dimensions of post-birth marriage (i.e., occurrence, timing, identity of mother’s partner, relationship trajectory, and family instability) to child behavior problems, ...

OBJECTIVE To distinguish the effects of late preterm birth from the complications associated with the causes of delivery timing, this study used propensity score-matching methods on a statewide database that contains information on both mothers and infants. METHODS Data for this study came from Arkansas Medicaid claims data linked to state birth certificate data for the years 2001 through 200...

Microevolutionary projections use empirical estimates of genetic covariation between physical or psychological phenotypes and reproductive success to forecast changes in the population distributions of those phenotypes over time. The validity of these projections depends on relatively consistent heritabilities of fertility-relevant outcomes and consistent genetic covariation between fertility a...

Microevolutionary projections use empirical estimates of genetic covariation between physical or psychological phenotypes and reproductive success to forecast changes in the population distributions of those phenotypes over time. The validity of these projections depends on relatively consistent heritabilities of fertility-relevant outcomes and consistent genetic covariation between fertility a...

background: around one out of two mothers give births by cesarean section (cs) surgery in iran and about half of this number is due to previous cs. recently health sector evolution (hsep) program (started in april 2014) targets the high rate of cs in iran. to assess the impact of the interventions, we emphasized that the first birth cesarean (fbc) proportion is one of the main indicators to ass...

A classification system of various forms of major newborn birth injuries is clearly lacking in the literature. Currently, no scales exist for distinguishing degrees, extent, or distinctions of major birth injuries. The purpose of this study was to use published and online literature to explore the timing, prediction, and outcomes of major newborn birth injuries. Potential antecedents and causes...

BACKGROUND Acute gastroenteritis (AGE) is a leading cause of infectious morbidity in childhood. Clinical studies have implicated caesarean section, early birth and formula feeding in modifying normal gut microbiota development and immune system homeostasis in early life. Rates of early birth and cesarean delivery are also increasing worldwide. This study aimed to investigate the independent and...