Pregnancy and Child Health

Dear Colleagues,

The improvement of maternal and child health was presented as the 5th United Nations Millennium Development Goal. However, it remains a key issue in global health. The new UN’s Global Goals for 2030 emphasize that ensuring people live healthy lives can cut child mortality and raise life expectancy.

Worldwide maternal and child health-related outcomes are markedly affected by environmental and socio-demographic factors including access to health care, vaccination, good nutrition, adequate housing, clean water and sanitation, education and employment. For example, uneducated and low-income women are more likely to face stressful life events during their life course and experience childbirth-related complications and poor gestational outcomes (e.g., preterm birth, intrauterine growth restriction, neonatal death) compared to well educated and high-income women. Preterm birth and intrauterine growth restriction can set a newborn baby on a life-long course of disparities in health-related outcomes. Children born into poverty are also more likely to have delayed cognitive development and poor school performance.

Maternal nutrition and cardiometabolic health are also powerful determinants of gestational outcomes. Women suffering from diabetes, iron deficiency anemia or obesity are at a higher risk of childbearing complications. Research indicates that babies born to mothers who are overweight or obese during pregnancy are at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes in later life.

This Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) aims at advancing scientific and professional knowledge in the maternal, newborn and child health field. We believe that this issue will be an excellent forum for disseminating outstanding research findings as well as sharing good practice and innovative ideas for improving maternal and child health.

This Special Issue will accept manuscripts addressing maternal and child health practice, policy and research, exploring a wide range of topics and disciplines, such as epidemiology, public health, nutrition, social sciences, demography, health status assessment, innovative service initiatives, service evaluation, economic evaluation, policy analysis, advocacy and professional development. It will include the following types of articles:

• Primary research (qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods studies)
• Systematic, scoping and narrative reviews
• Methodological papers
• Case studies
• Commentaries and position papers
• Brief reports

Dr. Amanda Rodrigues Amorim Adegboye
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.