Objective To determine the prevalence of domestic violence in a population of pregnant women.Design Questionnaire survey.Setting Antenatal booking clinic in a north of England hospital.Population Five hundred consecutive women were included.Methods Anonymous confidential questionnaire to women who were not accompanied by their partners.Main outcome measures Disclosure of a past history of physical, emotional or sexual abuse.Results Four hundred and seventy-five questionnaires were returned (95% response rate). The prevalence of domestic violence was 17%. Domestic violence was highest in the age group 26-30 years and boyfriends were the main perpetrators. Punching and slapping were the most common pattern of violence, and 10% of women experiencing domestic violence had had forced sexual activity. Conclusion The prevalence of domestic violence in a cohort of pregnant women in the north of England was 17%. Consideration should be given for routine screening for domestic violence in pregnancy to institute effective intervention strategies.

Objective To determine the prevalence of domestic violence in a population of women attending a gynaecology outpatient clinic in the United Kingdom and also to investigate whether women who reported domestic violence were more likely to complain of certain gynaecological symptoms. Design Questionnaire survey.Setting A gynaecology outpatient clinic in a North of England Hospital.Sample Nine hundred and twenty consecutive clinic attenders.Methods Anonymous confidential questionnaire given to women.Main outcome measures Disclosure of a past history of domestic violence and gynaecological complaints.Results Nine hundred and twenty consecutive women were included and 825 questionnaires were returned (90% response rate). The prevalence of physical abuse was 21% (171/825). Thirty-four (4%) had experienced violence in the past year. Domestic violence is three times less common in women over 50 years old. Exhusbands (32%) and ex-boyfriends (29%) were the main perpetrators. Forty-eight percent women who had experienced physical violence also had forced sexual activity. Of the 15 presenting symptoms reported by the women, lower abdominal pain, dysmenorrhoea, dyspareunia, smear abnormalities, cancer worries and bowel symptoms were significantly more common complaints in the group who reported domestic violence. The women with domestic violence also had significantly more consultations; however, the duration of their symptoms was not significantly different. Conclusion The prevalence of domestic violence in a cohort of women who attended the gynaecology outpatient clinic in a North of England Hospital was 21%. Women who are subjected to domestic violence tend to have more consultations and are more likely to complain of certain symptoms.

After a review of the literature, occult anal sphincter injury is mostly associated with the first vaginal delivery and is particularly high following instrumental deliveries. Ventouse is less traumatic than forceps. Cesarean section is protective to the anal sphincter.

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What information single neurons receive about general neural circuit activity is a fundamental question for neuroscience. Somatic membrane potential (V m ) fluctuations are driven by the convergence of synaptic inputs from a diverse cross-section of upstream neurons. Furthermore, neural activity is often scale-free, implying that some measurements should be the same, whether taken at large or small scales. Together, convergence and scale-freeness support the hypothesis that single V m recordings carry useful information about high-dimensional cortical activity. Conveniently, the theory of "critical branching networks" (one purported explanation for scale-freeness) provides testable predictions about scale-free measurements that are readily applied to V m fluctuations. To investigate, we obtained whole-cell current-clamp recordings of pyramidal neurons in visual cortex of turtles with unknown genders. We isolated fluctuations in V m below the firing threshold and analyzed them by adapting the definition of "neuronal avalanches" (i.e., spurts of population spiking). The V m fluctuations which we analyzed were scale-free and consistent with critical branching. These findings recapitulated results from large-scale cortical population data obtained separately in complementary experiments using microelectrode arrays described previously (Shew et al., 2015). Simultaneously recorded single-unit local field potential did not provide a good match, demonstrating the specific utility of V m . Modeling shows that estimation of dynamical network properties from neuronal inputs is most accurate when networks are structured as critical branching networks. In conclusion, these findings extend evidence of critical phenomena while also establishing subthreshold pyramidal neuron V m fluctuations as an informative gauge of high-dimensional cortical population activity. The relationship between membrane potential (V m ) dynamics of single neurons and population dynamics is indispensable tounderstanding cortical circuits. Just as important to the biophysics of computation are emergent properties such as scale-freeness, where critical branching networks offer insight. This report makes progress on both fronts by comparing statistics from singleneuron whole-cell recordings with population statistics obtained with microelectrode arrays. Not only are fluctuations of somatic V m scale-free, they match fluctuations of population activity. Thus, our results demonstrate appropriation of the brain's own subsampling method (convergence of synaptic inputs) while extending the range of fundamental evidence for critical phenomena in neural systems from the previously observed mesoscale (fMRI, LFP, population spiking) to the microscale, namely, V m fluctuations.