Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Sexuality Education, Eva Goldfarb, Norman A. Constantine

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

Sexuality education comprises the lifelong intentional processes by which people learn about themselves and others as sexual, gendered beings from biological, psychological, and sociocultural perspectives. It takes place through a potentially wide range of programs and activities in schools, community settings, religious centers, as well as informally within families, among peers, and through electronic and other media. Sexuality education for adolescents occurs in the context of the biological, cognitive, and social-emotional developmental progressions and issues of adolescence. Formal sexuality education falls into two main categories: behavior change approaches, which are represented by abstinence-only and abstinence-plus models, and healthy sexual development …

Expecting To Quit: A Best-Practices Review Of Smoking Cessation Interventions For Pregnant And Postpartum Girls And Women, Lorraine Greaves, Nancy Poole, Chizimuzo T.C. Okoli, Natalie Hemsing, Annie Qu, Lauren Bialystok, Renée O’Leary

Chizimuzo T.C. Okoli

This report examines interventions designed to reduce or eliminate smoking during pregnancy. It considers these interventions using a “better practices” methodology designed by Moyer, Cameron, Garcia, and Maule (2002, p. 124) for intervention studies published prior to 2003, and a systematic review methodology from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) (2006) in the UK for those studies published after 2003. We contextualize the results of these analyses in the wider literature on women’s health, women-centred care, and women’s tobacco use to better interpret them. These results build on those in the first edition of Expecting to Quit …

Factors Associated With Tobacco Use Among Rural And Urban Pregnant Women, Whitney Jeanne Katirai

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influences of smoking on rural and urban pregnant women. More specifically, the variables of the knowledge of health effects, health provider recommendations, subscores from the Health Belief Model (HBM), and social support were explored in relation to the smoking behavior of pregnant women. A secondary purpose was to investigate the accuracy of self-reported smoking during pregnancy using biochemical validation. Pregnant women (N=71) completed an anonymous questionnaire, designed by the researcher, to identify variables that predicted smoking for urban and rural women. Participants also gave a saliva sample for cotinine testing.

Approximately …

Prenatal Maternal Stress Programs Infant Stress Regulation, Elyssia Poggi Davis, Laura M. Glynn, Feizal Waffarn, Curt A. Sandman

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Objective: Prenatal exposure to inappropriate levels of glucocorticoids (GCs) and maternal stress are putative mechanisms for the fetal programming of later health outcomes. The current investigation examined the influence of prenatal maternal cortisol and maternal psychosocial stress on infant physiological and behavioral responses to stress.

Methods: The study sample comprised 116 women and their full term infants. Maternal plasma cortisol and report of stress, anxiety and depression were assessed at 15, 19, 25, 31 and 36 + weeks' gestational age. Infant cortisol and behavioral responses to the painful stress of a heel-stick blood draw were evaluated at 24 hours after …