For how we live.
Heartburn is one of the most common complaints in pregnancy. Diet and posture changes come first; a Cochrane review found antacid-type medicines relieve it, but the trial evidence is thin and drug choice needs care.
Guidelines set weight-gain ranges by starting BMI, not a doubled appetite. A large meta-analysis links gaining outside those ranges to worse outcomes at both ends — smaller and larger babies alike.
Drawing on households across every province and region, researchers estimate a stillbirth rate of 30.5 per 1,000 births and a maternal mortality ratio of 176 per 100,000 — both above national and 2030 targets.
A Lancet Global Health model projects that barring women from nursing and midwifery training could cut maternal care-seeking to a third of current levels and raise the maternal mortality ratio 29% to 41% by 2035.
For most women without complications, activity in pregnancy is safe and beneficial. Trials link exercise to lower odds of gestational diabetes and high blood pressure, with a rough dose to aim for.
Nausea in early pregnancy is common and usually mild. Ginger has the best trial support for nausea, vitamin B6 and doxylamine are options, and acupuncture shows no clear benefit.
Guidelines settle on a limit near 200 mg a day — roughly two mugs of coffee. But the underlying studies are observational, and a vocal minority argues there is no clearly safe level.
A modelling study of 93 household surveys corrects for the chronic underreporting that hides stillbirths, and finds steady but socially unequal declines in perinatal mortality since 1990.
Two large African trials gave anaemic pregnant women intravenous ferric carboxymaltose or oral iron. Neither found less anaemia near term, or heavier babies, with the infusion.
The E-MOTIVE trial, across 80 hospitals and 210,132 births in four African countries, paired objective blood measurement with a first-response bundle — and severe outcomes fell sharply.
A meta-analysis of 28 studies and 684,065 people links intimate partner violence to raised odds of neonatal, infant and under-5 death — the association strongest for sexual violence.
Across 26 states, expansion raised the Medicaid-paid share of deliveries by 5.2% and changed the severe maternal morbidity rate by 0.02% — an interval that includes zero in both directions.
A Bulletin of the WHO study recorded 168 maternal deaths between October 2023 and June 2024, alongside higher stillbirth, neonatal-death and preterm-birth rates than before the war.
About 260,000 women died in pregnancy or childbirth in 2023; 37 conflict-affected or fragile countries accounted for 61% of those deaths while holding only a quarter of the world's births.
In 59 facilities across Malawi and Uganda where 431,394 women gave birth, the APT-Sepsis programme reduced infection-related death, near-miss events and severe illness from 1.9% to 1.4%.