Antenatal care encompasses a broad spectrum of clinical procedures and care provided to pregnant women. Ideally, all pregnant women should have proper access to effective antenatal care irrespective of their social, economic, cultural and geographical background. This paper investigates the...

The objective of this paper is to analyze the differential mortality by sex in health macroregion southern Minas Gerais, in 1999 and 2009. Mortality data and information on population were collected at the website of the Department of the Unified Health System (DATASUS). To measure the...

The present study explores and describes, in detail, an application of the Grade of Membership (GoM) method, widely used in demographic studies. It presents an exercise to data used in a previous study (Assis and coleagues, 2008), which relates to neonatal deaths in a public hospital in Belo...

This paper aims to provide insights for the development of a study based on utilization rates on health services. The following topics are addressed: (1) the motivation for the study of health services utilization rates ; (2) utilization rates of public health services in light of demographic...

Brazil experiences a demographic transition characterized by the aging of its population and a proportional increase in the number of the elderly. Therefore, researches that focus on the elderly individual are important. The present qualitative study aims to add to the understanding of this...

The aim of the present study was to examine, in the literature, aspects related to mortality differentials among men and women, focusing on age related differences in the time course (for developing countries). We did find evidence that, over the two last centuries, the sex differences followed...

The aim of this paper is to present healthcare expenditures indicators of the private healthcare system in Brazil. We use administrative records of a healthcare insurance company that provide collective contracts to its employees. The indicators are classified according to the type of healthcare...

The aim of the present study is to measure the impact of smoking on life expectancy at birth, by sex and age in two capital cities, Curitiba and Belo Horizonte in 2003. The analysis is performed using the methodology of multiple decrements, eliminating the mortality attributable to smoking in...

Brazil presents severe socioeconomic inequalities among regions and individuals. Several studies analyze the determinants of these inequalities and its effects on social welfare indicators, such as health. This paper measures the socioeconomic inequalities in healthcare utilization in Brazil and...

There is evidence that behavioral and lifestyle changes, encouraged by the Protestant churches in Brazil (especially Pentecostals and Neo-Pentecostals), are positively associated with variables such as health and income, which are, in their turn, considered into the Human Development Index (HDI)...