Barriers that impede primary health care physicians from screening women for domestic violence at Makkah ALmukarramah City

Background: nowadays, violence against women represents a major public health concern despite the efforts to raise awareness about it at the local and the global level. Doctors have a crucial role to play in detecting violence against women but they are confronted to many barriers

Objective: to identify the barriers that impedes physicians from screening women for domestic violence

Subjects and methods: a cross-sectional study was conducted using a questionnaire to collect data from 62 primary health care physicians at Makah Almukarramah city

Results: more than a half of the physicians, working at primary health centers at Makkah and who participated in our survey, dealt with a case of women abused by her partner. Many participants agreed that there were barriers that impeded them from screening violence like insufficient training, feeling of embarrassment, shame of asking question about abuse and fear of revenge by the husband or relatives

Conclusion: implementing training program with intervention could help in managing and preventing violence against women

Quantitative morphometric study of the chorionic villi in hypertensive mothers

Background: Several studies have reported that mothers with pregnancy induced hypertension or those suffering from hypertensive disorders have abnormalities in histological features of the placenta. The fetus connection with the mother is through chorionic villi. Besides several other histological features changes in the chorionic villi have also been reported. This lead to the reduced supply of the necessary nutritional elements for the fetus

The aim of the Study: The principal objective of this study was to evaluate morphometric changes in the placenta of expecting mothers have hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and women without any symptoms of hypertension. As the placenta is capillary-rich region and any physiological change can adversely affect the fetal health

Patients and Methods: In this study, a total of 84 expecting mothers were recruited. Among these 42 have hypertensive symptoms before pregnancy whereas the other 42 have their blood pressure in normal ranges. Among the 42 hypertensive women, only 13 met the study inclusion criteria,i.e., blood pressure in the range of 140/90 mmHg in the 30th week of the pregnancy. The quantitative morphometric parameters included shape and size of the placenta, damage to the blood vessels mainly in the chorionic villi and an overall number of blood vessels

Results: A comparative evaluation of placenta from the hypertensive and normotensive expecting mothers showed that blood vessels area in the hypertensive mothers was significantly reduced when compared to normotensive mothers, same holds from the blood vessels in the perimeter areas. These findings have important implications as far as the fetal development among hypertensive mothers is concerned

Conclusions: Higher blood pressure associated changes in the placenta are manifested in the form of several histological and morphological changes mainly in the chorionic villi structures involved in fulfilling nutritional requirements of the fetus