Antenatal care utilization is influenced by several factors. Due to our peculiar socioeconomic and cultural circumstances, gestational age at booking may be affected by certain variables. The aim of this study was to determine the influence of parity and other socio demographic factors on gestational age at booking amongst pregnant women in Enugu, South Eastern Nigeria. This is a prospective mu...

OBJECTIVE Despite an increase in the proportion of women who access antenatal care, mother-to-child transmission of syphilis continues to be a consequence of undiagnosed, untreated, or inadequately treated maternal syphilis. We reviewed evidence on the optimal timing of antenatal interventions to prevent mother-to-child transmission of syphilis and its associated adverse outcomes. DESIGN Syst...

In sub-Saharan Africa, although male involvement in antenatal care is associated with positive outcomes for HIV-infected women and their infants, men rarely accompany female partners. We implemented a project to increase the number of male partners attending an antenatal clinic at Bwaila Hospital in Lilongwe, Malawi. We evaluated changes in the proportion of women who came with a partner over t...

International organizations promote provider-initiated, 'routine' HIV testing of pregnant women seeking antenatal care as an effort to curb mother-to-child transmission. We offer an account of the perceptions of HIV testing at antenatal clinics in rural Malawi. Although it is both international and Government of Malawi policy that women must be explicitly informed of their right to refuse testi...

In the original article by Dubowitz et al. (1970) and in the subsequent studies there were few infants ofvery lowweight or gestational age: there were only 3 infants at 32 weeks, one at 31, and 2 at 28 weeks. The line for the lower gestations is an extrapolation of the correlation found nearer term. Singer et al. (1973) added a further 16 scores below 32 weeks. It is therefore gratifying to hav...

This study aimed to identify the difficulties nurses experience at the start of their professional life in prenatal care activities. Data were collected through interviews with 25 nurses who accompanied prenatal care in the basic health network of Rio Branco-AC, Brazil and were grouped according to the frequency and level of difficulty they mentioned. We observed that nurses did not demonstrate...

Pregnancy adds many sources of concerns to women's daily life worries. Excessive worry can affect maternal physiological and psychological state that influences the pregnancy outcomes. The aim of this study was to validate the Cambridge Worry Scale (CWS) in a sample of Iranian pregnant women. After translation of the CWS, ten experts evaluated the items and added six items to the 17-item scale....

This paper explores the pathways of the determinants of unfavourable birth outcomes, such as premature birth, the size of the baby at birth, and Caesarean section deliveries, in Kenya using graphical log-linear chain models. The results show that a number of factors that do not have direct associations with unfavourable birth outcomes contribute to these outcomes indirectly through intermediate...

The first study in a series concerned with the costs of different strategies of maternity care showed the differences between the costs of booked confinement at home, in a GP hospital for 48 hours, and in a consultant obstetric unit for 48 hours to be small. The study costed 1977 home confinements in Dudley and compared them with matched samples of hospital births. The factors that compensated,...

OBJECTIVE Voluntary HIV counseling and testing are provided to all Brazilian pregnant women with the purpose of reducing mother-to-child HIV transmission. The purpose of the study was to assess characteristics of HIV testing and identify factors associated with HIV counseling and testing. METHODS A cross-sectional study was carried out comprising 1,658 mothers living in Porto Alegre, Brazil. ...