Tags : world, us, study, post term pregnancies, risk, infant’s life
Posted: Friday , Oct 10, 2008 at 1411 hrs IST Washington, October 10::
Studies in the United States have suggested that post-term pregnancies risk infant’s life and health.
Scientists from the University of Californias San Francisco (UCSF) and Berkeley campuses compared more than 2.5 million normal-weight births from healthy pregnancies of 37 to 42 weeks gestation, the range that is considered to be full-term.
The findings, which appear in the October issue of the ‘American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology’, suggested that children born more than one week past their due dates have a greater risk of both impaired health and death.
The first study, which followed 1.8 million normal births in California from 1999 to 2003, reported greater odds of infant death among those born at 41 and 42 weeks. The second study examined 2.5 million low-risk births in the US in 2003, and reported that the risk of cesarean deliveries and poor health outcomes for both mother and child increased at 40 weeks and beyond.
“Combined, these two papers provide very compelling evidence of the importance of closely monitoring pregnancies beyond 40 weeks and possibly intervening to prevent complications to both mother and child,” said Aaron Caughey, an associate professor of obstetrics at the UCSF Medical Center and UCSF School of Medicine and senior author on both papers.
“Significant research has focused on the risks of premature deliveries, but until now, there have been no large-scale studies documenting the increased risk of delivering at 40 weeks or more, Caughey said.
The study, reported by the Science Daily online, found that infants delivered at 41or 42 weeks had an increased chance of death within 28 days, and that the elevated mortality rates persist across the entire range of normal birth weights.
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