Background Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH) is a disorder-an ideal candidate to deserve newborn screening. CAH accounts for a significant mortality and morbidity in India, and its awareness among obstetricians should be treated as highly important to prevent the problem.Purpose of the Study It is very important for a country like India as the incidence of CAH is reasonably high justifying screening program. However, there are simple logistics that need to be followed, and the treating physicians need to be aware of, if one has to reduce the number of false positives and recalls. Methods This article takes one through the steps involved in the analysis, interpretation, and reasons for false positives, why the false positives, so that unnecessary calls to parents for repeat sampling are minimized along with the emphasis and the need for the routine screening for CAH. Results/Conclusion The results of samples can vary depending on the gestational age of the baby, weight of the baby, sampling time, and the knowledge of these data to the treating Obstetrician and Pediatrician is of paramount importance in preventing repeat samples and frustration for the family and the people involved.

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Objective: Newborn Hearing Screening to detect the hearing problems in neonates has become a standard of care in the USA, Australasia and UK after recent guidelines. We undertook this as a routine procedure in our hospital since Jan 2007.Setting: Tertiary Maternity Hospitals in Bangalore, India.Participants: All babies born above 35 weeks at the hospital and were with the mothers during the first few days -and not requiring NICU admission.Results: Between Jan 2007 and Mar 2016 a total of 30,600 neonates were screened using Newborn Hearing Screening. 75 neonates who failed screening, a thorough clinical examination by the neonatologists revealed that 58 babies had a false positive result and passed the test after a week and 17 babies were investigated with an audiogram by a Paediatric Audiologist and 8 out of those fifteen infants had hearing difficulties requiring treatment by an ENT Surgeon. Conclusion:These data confirm that Newborn Hearing screening of apparently well newborns should become a standard of care in India like many other developed countries and is very cost effective.

Objective: To identify peri-conceptional diet patterns among women in Bangalore, and examine their associations with risk of gestational diabetes mellitus. Design: BANGLES, started in June 2016, was a prospective observational study, in which women were recruited at 5-16 weeks’ gestation. Peri-conceptional diet was recalled at recruitment, using a validated 224-item food frequency questionnaire. GDM was assessed by a 75-gram oral glucose tolerance test at 24-28 weeks’ gestation, applying WHO 2013 criteria. Diet patterns were identified using principal component analysis and diet pattern-GDM associations were examined using multivariate logistic regression, adjusting for ‘a priori’ confounders. Setting: Antenatal clinics of two hospitals, Bangalore, South India Participants: 785 pregnant women of varied socio-economic status Results: GDM prevalence was 22%. Three diet patterns were identified: a) High-diversity, urban (HDU) characterised by diverse, home-cooked and processed foods was associated with older, more affluent, better-educated and urban women; b) Rice-fried snacks-chicken-sweets (RFCS), characterised by low diet-diversity, was associated with younger, less-educated, and lower income, rural and joint families; c) Healthy, traditional vegetarian (HTV), characterised by home-cooked-vegetarian and non-processed foods was associated with less-educated, more affluent, and rural and joint families. The HDU pattern was associated with a lower GDM risk (aOR: 0.80 per SD, 95% CI: 0.64, 0.99, p=0.04) after adjusting for confounders. BMI was strongly related to GDM risk and possibly mediated diet-GDM associations. Conclusions: The findings support global recommendations to encourage women to attain a healthy pre-pregnancy BMI and increase diet-diversity. Both healthy and unhealthy foods in the patterns indicate low-awareness about healthy foods and a need for public-education.

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