Browsing by Autor "Diva Bellido"

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Factors Influencing the Use of Biomedical Health Care by Rural Bolivian Anemic Women: Structural Barriers, Reproductive Status, Gender Roles, and Concepts of Anemia
(Public Library of Science, 2017) Rebecca M. Bedwell; Hilde Spielvogel; Diva Bellido; Virginia J. Vitzthum
Securing iron supplements involves individual trade-offs in the allocation of time, cost and effort. Nonetheless, suitably tailored programs can potentially harness local perceptions in the service of reducing anemia. Because of their comparatively high motivation to obtain iron supplements, targeting concurrently breastfeeding and menstruating women could have a positive cascade effect such that these women continue attending to their iron needs once they stop breastfeeding and if they become pregnant again. Because a sense of shared responsibility for family health appears to encourage women to attend to their own health, programs for women could involve their spouses. Complementing centralized availability, biomedical and traditional healers could distribute iron supplements on rotating visits to outlying areas and/or at highly attended weekly markets.
Perinatal hypoxia increases susceptibility to high-altitude polycythemia and attendant pulmonary vascular dysfunction
(American Physical Society, 2015) Colleen G. Julian; Marcelino Gonzales; Armando Rodríguez; Diva Bellido; Carlos Salinas Salmón; Anne Ladenburger; Lindsay Reardon; Enrique Vargas; Lorna G. Moore
Perinatal exposures exert a profound influence on physiological function, including developmental processes vital for efficient pulmonary gas transfer throughout the lifespan. We extend the concept of developmental programming to chronic mountain sickness (CMS), a debilitating syndrome marked by polycythemia, ventilatory impairment, and pulmonary hypertension that affects ∼10% of male high-altitude residents. We hypothesized that adverse perinatal oxygenation caused abnormalities of ventilatory and/or pulmonary vascular function that increased susceptibility to CMS in adulthood. Subjects were 67 male high-altitude (3,600-4,100 m) residents aged 18-25 yr with excessive erythrocytosis (EE, Hb concentration ≥18.3 g/dl), a preclinical form of CMS, and 66 controls identified from a community-based survey (n = 981). EE subjects not only had higher Hb concentrations and erythrocyte counts, but also lower alveolar ventilation, impaired pulmonary diffusion capacity, higher systolic pulmonary artery pressure, lower pulmonary artery acceleration time, and more frequent right ventricular hypertrophy, than controls. Compared with controls, EE subjects were more often born to mothers experiencing hypertensive complications of pregnancy and hypoxia during the perinatal period, with each increasing the risk of developing EE (odds ratio = 5.25, P = 0.05 and odds ratio = 6.44, P = 0.04, respectively) after other factors known to influence EE status were taken into account. Adverse perinatal oxygenation is associated with increased susceptibility to EE accompanied by modest abnormalities of the pulmonary circulation that are independent of increased blood viscosity. The association between perinatal hypoxia and EE may be due to disrupted alveolarization and microvascular development, leading to impaired gas exchange and/or pulmonary hypertension.
Salivary/Serum Progesterone Ratio Differs Between Menstrual Cycle Phases but Not Between Populations: Implications for Health, Reproductive, and Behavioral Research
(Wiley, 2025) Virginia J. Vitzthum; Diva Bellido; Lourdes Echalar; Esperanza Cáceres; Jonathan Thornburg
Hypothesis 1 was supported. Consistent with prior reports for other populations, in these Bolivian women UF was higher and more variable in the follicular than in the luteal phase. The source(s) of phase-associated variation in UF deserves additional study, particularly the dynamic relationship to different conformers of corticosteroid-binding globulin (CBG). Hypothesis 2 was not supported. Paired PFree-SAL and PTotal-VEN were highly correlated, and UF in these Bolivians was comparable to published values for other populations. Hypothesis 3 was not supported. There was no evidence that some individuals have consistently higher (or lower) UF than most other persons. In sum, these findings do not support the suggestions that the physiology underlying the relationship between PFree-SAL and PTotal-VEN differs substantially and inexplicitly between populations and individuals. These results also reinforce the critical roles of fastidious attention to sample collection and handling, judicious assessment of assay results, and appropriate statistical methods when using ovarian steroid data in any project. We suggest some guidelines for meeting these requirements. Used with due consideration for its advantages and limitations, PFree-SAL reliably tracks PTotal-VEN during the menstrual cycle and is a useful option in the biomarker toolkit. Just as it is costly to continue our work with tools not up to the task, so is it costly to discard useful tools without good reason. The development (and improvement through replication) of a robust toolkit for assessing changes in and the impacts of menstrual cycle hormones is foundational to reducing gender-based health disparities. (The linked file listed below under "Supporting Information" presents these findings in Spanish).