Background Although skilled birth care contributes significantly to the prevention of maternal and newborn morbidity and mortality, utilization of such care is poor in mid- and far-western Nepal. This study explored the perceptions of service users and providers regarding barriers to skilled birth care. Design We conducted 24 focus group discussions, 12 each with service users and service provi...

background : episiotomy is the incision of perineum made to facilitate childbirth. here are the two types of episiotomy: median and mediolateral. considering the important role of incision characteristics such as length, angle and distance of initiation point from midperineum line in prevention of perineal rupture and reduction of further complications, this study investigated the comparison ep...

background: about 21 millions premature and low birth weight (lbw) infants are born in the world every year where the majority of them are in the middle east countries. the literatures have shown that lbw infants and premature infants have a smaller chance to survive than the normal ones. this research carried out to determine the situation of catch up growth of lbw infants in comparison with n...

Maternal mortality is a global burden, with more than 500,000 women dying each year due to pregnancy and childbirth-related complications. Birth-preparedness and complication readiness is a comprehensive strategy to improve the use of skilled providers at birth, the key intervention to decrease maternal mortality. Birth-preparedness and complication readiness include many elements, including: (...

There has been significant controversy about the effect of prenatal diagnosis of critical congenital heart disease on mortality, and many large studies have demonstrated no benefit. The authors take a novel approach to this question in neonates with hypoplastic left heart syndrome in 2 ways: (1) they use the Texas Birth Defects Registry, which allows for capture of death prior to transfer to a ...

The effects of prenatal exposure to pollutants from the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster on fetal growth and subsequent health and development of exposed children remain a source of concern. We assessed the impact of gestational timing of the disaster and distance from the WTC in the 4 weeks after 11 September on the birth outcomes of 300 nonsmoking women who were pregnant at the time of the e...

We provide a probabilistic proof of the Stein's factors based on properties of birth and death Markov chains, solving a tantalising puzzle in using Markov chain knowledge to view the celebrated Stein-Chen method for Poisson approximations. This paper complements the work of Barbour (1988) for the case of Poisson random variable approximation. The Stein-Chen method was introduced in Chen (1975) ...

Despite its apparent distance from the core topics of economics, economists have been attracted to, and deeply engaged in, research about teen fertility for more than a quarter century. Research has focused on two broad, interrelated issues: the socio-economic consequences of a teen birth and the socio-economic causes of a teen birth. In researching these issues, economists have drawn on and ex...