February 4th, 2010 
Expectant mothers are getting a new tool to help keep themselves and their babies healthy: pregnancy tips sent directly to their cell phones.
The so-called text4baby campaign is the first free, health education program in the U.S. to harness the reach of mobile phones, according to its sponsors, which include Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, WellPoint and CareFirst BlueCross and Blue Shield. Wireless carriers including AT&T, Verizon and Sprint have agreed to waive all fees for receiving the texts.
Organizers say texting is an effective means of delivering wellness tips because 90 percent of people in the U.S. have cell phones.
“Especially if you start talking about low-income people, cell phones are the indispensable tool for reaching them and engaging them about their health,” said Paul Meyer, president of Voxiva, a company which operates health texting programs in Africa, Latin America and India.
Studies in those countries have shown that periodic texts can reduce smoking and other unhealthy behaviors in pregnant mothers.
Meyer said the U.S. program, run by Voxiva, will be the largest health-related texting program ever undertaken.
Under the new service, mothers-to-be who text “BABY” to 511411 will receive weekly text messages, timed to their due date or their baby’s birth date. The messages, which have been vetted by government and nonprofit health experts, deal with nutrition, immunization and birth defect prevention, among other topics. The messages will continue through the baby’s first birthday.
Text4baby is expected to be announced Thursday morning by officials from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Government officials will be publicizing the campaign in speeches and promotional materials.
Organizers hope the effort can curb premature births, which can be caused by poor nutrition, excessive stress, smoking and drinking alcohol. About 500,000 babies are born prematurely in the U.S. each year, and 28,000 infants die before their first birthday, according to the Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition. The nonprofit is among the sponsors of the campaign.
“The real scary thing is that we’re an industrialized nation and we’re not doing very well on infant mortality, and we know prematurity is a big part of that,” said the group’s director, Judy Meehan.
Currently the U.S. ranks 30th worldwide for infant mortality, according to Meehan, behind most Western European nations.
Researchers at the George Washington University have agreed to evaluate the effectiveness of text4baby by measuring health trends for mothers and newborns.
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First-time mothers are getting older across the country and around the world, according to new federal data released today that show the average age of new moms increased to 25 in the USA and 29 in several countries, including Japan and Switzerland.
The report from the National Center for Health Statistics on this trend in delayed childbearing compared statistics from 1970 and 2006. In the USA, it found dramatic increases in the average age during the 1970s and 1980s and a less dramatic but steady rise since.
The average age increased in all states and the District of Columbia and for all racial and ethnic groups. In 2006, Massachusetts, at 27.7 years, had the highest average age at first birth and Mississippi had the lowest at 22.6 years.
Elizabeth Gregory, director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Houston, says there are many reasons for the increase in age at first birth. She says the birth control pill, which debuted in the 1960s, allowed people to plan their families. Also, Gregory, 51, says increases in longevity have allowed people to start families later and “expect to be around to take care of them.”
For her 2008 book Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later Motherhood, Gregory, an English professor, interviewed 113 moms who had first children later in life. She says many cited getting their education and getting established at work as reasons for a delay.
“They had to get to the point where they were making a decent salary and had the clout to negotiate a family-friendly schedule and not lose their seniority,” says Gregory, who had her first child at 39 and adopted a second daughter at age 48.
The proportion of first births among women age 35 and older increased nearly eight times between 1970 and 2006. In 2006, about 1 out of 12 first births were to women of 35 years or more, compared with 1 out of 100 in 1970.
At the same time, first births to mothers under age 20 dropped. Only 21% of first births were to teen mothers in 2006, compared to 36% in 1970.
However, the USA’s high teen birth rate is the reason the overall age at first birth isn’t as high as other developed countries, says T.J. Mathews, a co-author of the report.
Data from the United Nations Demographic Yearbook for 2006 shows that the teen birth rate in the USA was more than eight times higher than the birth rate in Japan, seven times higher than in Denmark and Sweden and more than three times as high as in Canada. The data compiled by the United Nations Statistics Division is based on annual questionnaires to more than 230 national statistical offices around the world, which include basic data on population trends, births, deaths, marriage and divorce.
The teen birth rate in the USA increased 3% in 2006, ending a 34% drop in births among women ages 15-19 from 1991 to 2005. Even with that long period of decline in the teen birth rate, Sarah Brown, CEO of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, says the new report illustrates how much more needs to be done to address the problem of teen pregnancy and teen births.
The federal report also found that among racial and ethnic groups in 2006:
- •The oldest average age at first birth (28.5 years) was to Asian or Pacific Islander women.
- •The youngest (21.9 years) was to Alaska Native women.
- •The age of 26.0 for white women at first birth is older than the average for the U.S. population at 25.0.
- •The average age at first birth for black women was 22.7 years.
- •The average age for first-time mothers was 23.1 years among Hispanics.
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More than 30 years after the world greeted its first “test-tube” baby with a mixture of awe, elation and concern, researchers say they are finding only a few medical differences between these children and kids conceived in the traditional way.
More than 3 million children have been born worldwide as a result of what is called assisted reproductive technology, and injecting sperm into the egg outside the human body now accounts for about 4 percent of live births, researchers reported Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The majority of assisted reproduction children are healthy and normal, according to researchers who have studied them. Some of these children do face an increased risk of birth defects, such as neural tube defects, and of low birth weight, which is associated with obesity, hypertension and Type 2 diabetes later in life, the researchers said.
Carmen Sapienza, a geneticist at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia, noted that few of these test tube children are older than 30, so it’s not known if they will be obese or have hypertension or other health problems at age 50 or older.
Sapienza said researchers found differences in 5 percent to 10 percent of chromosomes between assisted reproduction children and other kids.
What’s not clear is whether these differences result in some way from assisted reproduction techniques or if they stem from other factors, perhaps ones that caused the couple’s infertility in the first place.
One factor in low birth weight may be that in many cases assisted fertility results in multiple births, which tend to be early and of lower weight.
Sapienza noted that women seeking assisted reproduction tend to be older than those who conceive naturally, but said that had been controlled for in the studies comparing the two groups of children.
Dolores J. Lamb of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston urged more testing of males for the reason for infertility.
“There are correctable causes of male infertility and a couple can then have children the natural way,” she said. Also, infertility can be the first symptom of diseases such as testicular cancer, Lamb said.
As of 2008, the most recent data available, the United States reported that 361 clinics did 140,795 treatment cycles leading to the birth of 56,790 babies.
