Breastfeeding status and its influence on Native American women’s food preferences

Introduction: To evaluate if breastfeeding alters Native American women’s food preferences, recently postpartum women were offered food interest surveys during their 6-week postpartum checkup at W. W. Hastings Indian Hospital in Tahlequah, OK (a Native American serving health facility owned by the Cherokee Nation of OK).Methods: Surveys were offered at check in, and no identifying information (name, age, race, SSN) or protected health information was collected. Women were asked whether they were breastfeeding, number of infants delivered, and if this was their first baby. Level of hunger was rated on a Likert scale that ranged from 1 (not hungry at all) to 9 (very hungry), with 5 indicating “don’t care.”Results: Overall, breastfeeding women indicated increased hunger ratings over non-breastfeeding women. Next, the rate of interest in eating specific foods from 6 different taste categories (salty, sweet, meaty, bitter, sour, and hot) was determined. There were no striking differences in eating foods in particular taste categories, except for sweet foods. In the sweet group, there was a greater interest in eating chocolate bars and cookies in the breastfeeding women.Conclusions: These findings represent the potential impact of breastfeeding on the interest in eating certain foods by Native American women and how breastfeeding status may guide food preferences, thus altering food choices. We found that Native American women in the breastfeeding group indicated a higher interest in eating foods of the sweet category in comparison to the nonbreastfeeding Native American mothers. These choices may have implications for postpartum weight loss as well as for childhood disease processes such as diabetes mellitus, obesity, and other nutrition related diseases as maternal food choices influence family meals and the overall health of her children

Influence of COVID-19 on contraception: a cross-sectional analysis of disrupted clinical trials

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated barriers to contraceptive services and disrupted the progression of ongoing clinical trials (CTs) in several fields of medicine1–4, including contraceptive care. Further, sponsors have restricted CTs due to funding uncertainty. The impact of the pandemic has not yet been quantified in research related to contraception-related trials, thus our aim was to identify trials that were prematurely discontinued.Methods: We searched ClinicalTrials.gov to identify contraception-related trials, and where applicable, reasons for discontinuation. We extracted the number of participants per trial, funding source, and trial location. We assessed associations between reasons for discontinuation (COVID-19 vs. other reasons) and 1) trial size via Mann-Whitney U test, funding source, and location via Fishers exact.Results: Of the 107 contraceptive-related studies, 12 (11.21%) were discontinued between January 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021. There were a total of 4,614 individuals enrolled in discontinued trials, with a median enrollment of 18 (IQR: 5 - 276). Two trials explicitly stated COVID-19 as a reason for termination, four reported sponsor-requested termination, two reported recruitment issues, one reported funding issues, two studies did not report a reason and one principal investigator left.Conclusions: For the 415 women enrolled in contraception-related CTs that were discontinued explicitly due to COVID-19, access to contraception may have been impaired or discontinued. Given that COVID-19 could be an underlying reason or contributing factor to why the remaining studies were terminated, it is also possible that more women’s contraceptive care was disrupted due to the effects of the pandemic. This is worrisome because discontinuation of contraception can have many negative effects, the most significant of which is unintended pregnancy and its resulting possible ramifications