Maternal, Newborn, and Adolescent Health

By analyzing national children vaccination coverage from spatial perspectives, the study aims to uncover insights into the traditional surveillance. This will help to identify coverage rates, regions of greater vulnerability by providing a differentiated look at the logic of equity in health. Understanding the low childhood vaccination coverage will help to guide public policies for the purpose of interventions.

Aims to access all 68.3 million living births certificates from Brazil, from 1994 to 2016, and compare them with breastfeeding policies in all Brazilian hospitals to assess the impact of the initiatives on infant health. The study also plans to estimate the number of avoidable deaths during this time period, if those initiatives were adopted in Brazil.

The project will develop a platform to provide services for decision-making support for neonatal death preventive actions by using data from CIDACS cohort. The platform will offer three services: cohort data visualization for decision-making support by comparative human visual analysis, prediction of risk of neonatal death based on machine learning models, and simulator of public policies impact influencing on the risk of neonatal death.

Seeks to understand the impacts of the Bolsa Família conditional cash transfer on birth outcomes (e.g., birth weight, gestational weeks, etc). The proposed design will disentangle the measured effects into two components: one that is associated to the cash transfer; and another related to prenatal care assistance. Moreover, this strategy will allow the researchers to determine the window of opportunity where CCT interventions exhibit highest impacts on birth outcomes, recognizing heterogeneous impacts according to how early in the pregnancy the CCT intervention starts.

The study aims to develop an Early Childhood Development friendly index (ECD-FI) based on a core set of evidence-based nurturing care indicators to assess the factors contributing to enabling environments and promote ECD at the municipal level by monitoring and identifying opportunities to scale up ECD programs. The index will be created through machine learning and will run analytical models considering demographic information and risk factors at the municipal level. This disaggregated data is not available in Brazil.

The main goal of the project is to develop and explore an innovative measure of gestational age - "potential pregnancy days lost" (PPDL) - to produce evidence of its association with maternal and child health, morbidity and mortality in the short, medium and long term. The indicator also aims to convince women and policy makers about the need to promote less interventions and "harm-free care" during pregnancy.

Aims to validate the International Fetal and Newborn Growth Consortium for the 21st century (Intergrowth-21st) standards for gestational weight gain (GWG) and create new recommendations of GWG based on those standards for first trimester normal and overweight women to be used in the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS). GWG recommendations currently used in SUS have not been properly tested or validated, thus the project might improve prenatal nutritional care and reduce post gestational weight retention.

Andrew Hopkins of the University of Dundee in the United Kingdom is developing a screening platform using live human sperm to identify new male contraceptive drugs that inhibit two separate activities required for fertilization, namely motility and formation of the acrosome on the head of sperm cells. Currently, the only effective, widely available, and reversible form of male contraception is the condom, which has limited appeal. Alternative male contraceptives are needed to help reduce the estimated 89 million unintended pregnancies each year.

Teresa Woodruff of Northwestern University in the U.S. is developing automated, high-throughput tools using mouse ovarian follicles and endocrine loops between interacting organs integrated with a series of microfluidic and microdynamic systems to identify improved contraceptives with longer-term action and lower cost for low-resource settings.

Patricia Donahoe and David Pepin of Massachusetts General Hospital in the U.S. are using a cell-based screening platform to develop a new class of hormonal contraceptive that works at the early stage of primordial follicle activation to prolong the contraceptive effect and reduce side effects, thereby promoting wider use particularly in the developing world. This early stage of follicle development in the ovary is suppressed by a hormone (Mullerian inhibiting substance or MIS) to regulate egg production.