Lancet
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We consider the evidence for the effect of access to reproductive health services on the achievement of Millennium Development Goals 1, 2, and 3, which aim to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, and promote gender equality and empower women. At the household level, controlled trials in Matlab, Bangladesh, and Navrongo, Ghana, have shown that increasing access to family planning services reduces fertility and improves birth spacing. In the Matlab study, findings from long-term follow-up showed that women's earnings, assets, and body-mass indexes, and children's schooling and body-mass indexes, substantially improved in areas with improved access to family planning services compared with outcomes in control areas. At the macroeconomic level, reductions in fertility enhance economic growth as a result of reduced youth dependency and an increased number of women participating in paid labour.
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Long-term disorders are the main challenge facing health-care systems worldwide, but health systems are largely configured for individual diseases rather than multimorbidity. We examined the distribution of multimorbidity, and of comorbidity of physical and mental health disorders, in relation to age and socioeconomic deprivation. ⋯ Scottish Government Chief Scientist Office.
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Paralympic medicine describes the health-care issues of those 4500 or so athletes who gather every 4 years to compete in 20 sports at the Summer Paralympic Games and in five sports at the Winter Paralympic Games. Paralympic athletes compete within six impairment groups: amputation or limb deficiencies, cerebral palsy, spinal cord-related disability, visual impairment, intellectual impairment, or a range of physically impairing disorders that do not fall into the other classification categories, known as les autres. The variety of impairments, many of which are severe, fluctuating, or progressive disorders (and are sometimes rare), makes maintenance of health in thousands of Paralympians while they undertake elite competition an unusual demand on health-care resources. The increased physical fitness of athletes with disabilities has important implications for cardiovascular risk reduction in a population for whom the prevalence of risk factors can be high.