Helen Harris–Fry, Niva Shrestha, Anthony Costello, Naomi Saville
BACKGROUND: Nutrition interventions, often delivered at the household level, could increase their efficiency by channelling resources towards pregnant or lactating women, instead of leaving resources to be disproportionately allocated to traditionally favoured men. However, understanding of how to d...
Melissa Neuman, Glyn Alcock, Kishwar Azad, Abdul Kuddus et al.
OBJECTIVES: To describe the prevalence and determinants of births by caesarean section in private and public health facilities in underserved communities in South Asia. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. SETTING: 81 community-based geographical clusters in four locations in Bangladesh, India and Nepal (...
Andrew Mertens, Jade Benjamin‐Chung, John M. Colford, Jeremy Coyle et al.
. Interventions such as nutritional supplementation during pregnancy and the postnatal period could help prevent growth faltering, but programmatic action has been insufficient to eliminate the high burden of stunting and wasting in low- and middle-income countries. Identification of age windows and...
Jade Benjamin‐Chung, Andrew Mertens, John M. Colford, Alan Hubbard et al.
. Stunting, a form of linear growth faltering, increases the risk of illness, impaired cognitive development and mortality. Global stunting estimates rely on cross-sectional surveys, which cannot provide direct information about the timing of onset or persistence of growth faltering-a key considerat...
Andrew Mertens, Jade Benjamin‐Chung, John M. Colford, Alan Hubbard et al.
. Prevailing methods to measure wasting rely on cross-sectional surveys that cannot measure onset, recovery and persistence-key features that inform preventive interventions and estimates of disease burden. Here we analyse 21 longitudinal cohorts and show that wasting is a highly dynamic process of ...
Edward Fottrell, David Osrin, Glyn Alcock, Kishwar Azad et al.
OBJECTIVE: Understanding the causes of death is key to tackling the burden of three million annual neonatal deaths. Resource-poor settings lack effective vital registration systems for births, deaths and causes of death. We set out to describe cause-specific neonatal mortality in rural areas of Mala...
Sushmita Das, Glyn Alcock, Kishwar Azad, Abdul Kuddus et al.
BACKGROUND: Maternity care in South Asia is available in both public and private sectors. Using data from demographic surveillance sites in Bangladesh, Nepal and rural and urban India, we aimed to compare institutional delivery rates and public-private share. METHODS: We used records of maternity ca...
Christina Pagel, Audrey Prost, Munir Hossen, Kishwar Azad et al.
BACKGROUND: Provision of essential newborn care (ENC) can save many newborn lives in poor resource settings but coverage is far from universal and varies by country and place of delivery. Understanding gaps in current coverage and where coverage is good, in different contexts and places of delivery,...
Tanja A. J. Houweling, Joanna Morrison, Glyn Alcock, Kishwar Azad et al.
BACKGROUND: Efforts to end preventable newborn deaths will fail if the poor are not reached with effective interventions. To understand what works to reach vulnerable groups, we describe and explain the uptake of a highly effective community-based newborn health intervention across social strata in ...
Eric O. Verger, Sabrina Eymard‐Duvernay, D. Bahya-Batinda, Giles Hanley‐Cook et al.
Background: The Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women of Reproductive Age (MDD-W) indicator was validated as a proxy of micronutrient adequacy among nonpregnant women in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). At that time, indeed, there was insufficient data to validate the indicator among pregnant...
Erik de Jonge, Kishwar Azad, Munir Hossen, Abdul Kuddus et al.
BACKGROUND: In Bangladesh, India and Nepal, neonatal outcomes of poor infants are considerably worse than those of better-off infants. Understanding how these inequalities vary by country and place of delivery (home or facility) will allow targeting of interventions to those who need them most. We d...
Sonya Crowe, Audrey Prost, Munir Hossen, Kishwar Azad et al.
BACKGROUND: Delivery of essential newborn care is key to reducing neonatal mortality rates, yet coverage of protective birth practices remains incomplete and variable, with or without skilled attendance. Evidence of changes over time in newborn care provision, disaggregated by care practice and deli...
Avishek Hazra, Tashi Choedon, Monica Shrivastav, Raj Kumar Verma et al.
The health and health behaviours of women before conception significantly influence maternal and child health outcomes. Despite growing evidence supporting preconception nutrition care, data on the implementation of related policies and programmes remains limited. This paper reviews public policies ...
Thaís Rangel Bousquet Carrilho, Dongqing Wang, Jennifer A. Hutcheon, Molin Wang et al.
Background Existing gestational weight gain (GWG) charts vary considerably in their choice of exclusion/inclusion criteria, and it is unclear to what extent these criteria create differences in the charts' percentile values. Objectives We aimed to establish the impact of including/excluding pregnanc...