Yuri Sebastiao
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Public Health & Epidemiology
Doctors in wealthy countries increasingly offer to induce labor at 39 weeks of pregnancy, even when nothing is wrong, because a large US trial suggested this lowers the chance of cesarean delivery without harming the baby. Whether the same holds in hospitals with fewer resources is unknown, and those are exactly the places where complications around birth are most common.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Mathematics & Statistics
- Topics
elective induction of labor
expectant management
cesarean delivery
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Emulate a randomized trial of elective induction of labor at 39 weeks versus expectant management using observational LABOR study data, estimating causal effects on cesarean delivery and on combined fetal and neonatal illness and death among low-risk first-time mothers in Zambia, Ghana and India.
- Build an individualized decision framework that uses patient characteristics to identify which pregnant women are most likely to benefit from elective induction, applying precision-medicine methods to obstetric care in limited-resource hospitals.
- Harmonize outcome and exposure measures across the LABOR cohort and the US ARRIVE trial and apply external generalizability methods to test how far findings from each population transfer to the other.
More about the research
This project asks whether elective induction at term helps or harms mothers and newborns in low-resource settings, and which individual patients stand to benefit.
Why it matters
Perinatal illness and death are concentrated in low-resource settings, yet guidance on elective induction at 39 weeks comes almost entirely from high-resource trials. Evidence from hospitals in Zambia, Ghana and India, together with simple tools that identify which women are likely to benefit, could help clinicians and health systems make safer delivery decisions for first-time mothers and their newborns where the need is greatest.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 523 research doctorates a year.
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