Dr Robert Douglas Wilson is a longtime leader within the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada and this article is based upon his knowledge and extensive experience of screening processes before, during and after pregnancy.

This new series has both a broad and a specific goal. On the one hand, the introduction begins with a stark reminder that: Non-communicable diseases are the number one cause of mortality in women worldwide.

The findings of the cross-party inquiry into birth trauma are simultaneously horrific, depressing and (hopefully) a wake-up call. Their Report entitled, ‘Listen to Mums: Ending the Postcode Lottery on Perinatal Care’, presents, once again, facts and experiences that have long been familiar to women and to professionals working in maternity care.

If current polling is correct, then the Labour Party will return to power in the UK by early 2025. The last time Labour led the UK Government, one of its most prominent policies was the creation of Sure Start in 1997.

Increasingly sophisticated neurological research is yielding new, and sometimes surprising, insights about the ways in which infants process, understand and begin to use language. 

The International Federation of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (FIGO) first convened in Switzerland in 1954 and brought together professional Ob/Gyn societies from 42 nations. FIGO has been collaborating with WHO for nearly as long and has now expanded to 139 countries.

Most new parents, especially mothers, lose sleep over how best to feed their baby – and hunger for ways to ensure everyone gets a good night’s sleep.

The latest research in the UK (Knight et al. on behalf of MBRRACE, 2023) and Sweden (Hagatulah et al., 2024) reveals that the death rate during, and in the weeks following, pregnancy has increased significantly. Although similar data can be found among other ‘First World’ nations, the rate in the UK alone has reached a 20-year high.

New research suggests that speaking more than one language could help strengthen executive functioning, a set of skills critical to development and academic success.

First-time fathers seem to experience a steeper decline in relationship satisfaction in the first two years post-partum than second-time fathers, who appear to recover lost relationship satisfaction by the time their second child is 14 months old, according to a study published August 30, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Judith T. Mack and Lena Brunke from Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, and colleagues.

A study which linked national registries from Finland and Norway to investigate prematurity and the occurrence of two or more health conditions during adolescence found that earlier gestational age at birth was consistently associated with increasingly complex multi-morbidity in adolescence in a dose–response manner.

Researchers have discovered that myo-inositol, a small cyclic sugar molecule found in breast milk, plays a crucial role in promoting neuronal connections in infants’ brains.