August 28th, 2009 
Pregnancy is a precious time and a life-changing event. It is really a warm experience between mother and baby that should be cherished all the time. However, a condition may develop to make your pregnancy a high risk, which is commonly known as pregnancy complication.
Pregnancy complication is a condition that can threat you and developing baby during pregnancy. Remember that pregnancy complications can develop at any point of time throughout your pregnancy, which can ruin your very joyful time. It can also develop after the childbirth.
These complications can develop from several factors: chronic diseases (such as diabetes, hypertension), sexual transmitted diseases (syphilis, chlamydia), abnormalities of sperm/ovum, amniotic fluid, and placenta and infections that cause from virus, bacteria and parasites.
The possible pregnancy complications that can harm you and your developing fetus are as follows:
Gestational diabetes: It is the most common pregnancy complication that develops during pregnancy. It is found that two to seven percent of pregnant women develop this condition. This condition when left untreated can lead to increased risk of fetal death as well as thyroid problems.
It generally develops during second trimester of pregnancy. It can be treated by insulin supplementation to manage blood glucose levels.
Amniotic fluid complications: It is a pregnancy complication that results from a very high (polyhydramnios) or very low (oligohydramnios) amniotic fluid levels in the membranes surrounding the fetus.
Excessive amniotic fluid places pressure on your uterus causing pre-term delivery. It also puts pressure on your diaphragm, which leads to breathing problems. Oligohydramnios leads to poor fetal growth, post-term delivery, birth defects such as urinary tract abnormalities, etc.
Placental complications: The pregnancy complications of placenta are placental abruption and placental previa.
Premature detachment of a normally situated placenta is placental abruption where the exact cause for this condition is unknown. The detachment may be partial or complete.
Placental previa is the condition where the placenta is located in lower segment of the uterus, partially or completely covering the opening of the cervix. It leads to severe bleeding during second and third trimesters of pregnancy. The exact cause of placental previa is not known.
Preeclampsia/high blood pressure: Preeclampsia means the development of hypertension with edema or proteinuria or both during pregnancy. It generally occurs after twenty weeks of gestation. It is also called toxemia.
Ectopic pregnancy: It is a pregnancy complication where the development of fetus takes place outside the uterus or within the fallopian tubes. It can also be called as tubal pregnancy.
Rh Factor: If the mother is Rh negative and her partner Rh positive, the combination results in a baby with Rh positive. In this condition, when the blood transfers from mother to the child, the red blood cells will break down leading to anemia.
Miscarriage: Miscarriage is an unintentional or sudden loss of pregnancy. This type of pregnancy complication develops mostly due to age, gene factors, malnutrition, environmental hazards, hormonal problems, etc.
So, maintain a healthy pregnancy with proper prenatal care throughout pregnancy in order to avoid the occurrence of these pregnancy complications. Visit Pregnancy Blog
The Pregnancy blog helps you learn everything you need to know about Pregnancy. Know more about prenatal care, various pregnancy issues, pregnancy tools, etc. Visit http://www.thepregnancyzone.com/
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- Rheumatoid arthritis tied to pregnancy complications
Pregnant women with rheumatoid arthritis may have increased risks of high blood pressure, having an underweight baby or needing a cesarean section, a new study suggests.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) arises when the immune system mistakenly attacks tissue in the joints, leading to inflammation, pain and progressive joint damage. The disease is more common in women than men, and frequently develops during the childbearing years.
So far, studies have come to conflicting findings as to the potential effects of RA on pregnancy. Some, for example, have found that women with RA have higher risks of preterm delivery and having an underweight newborn, while others have found no such link.
For the new study, researchers used records from Taiwan’s national health system to compare 1,912 new mothers with RA with 9,560 new mothers without the disease.
They found that women with RA had a two-fold higher risk of pre-eclampsia — a potentially dangerous condition, marked by high blood pressure and protein in the urine, that develops in the second or third trimester.
Women with RA were also 47 percent more likely to have a low-birth-weight baby and 19 percent more likely to require a C-section, according to findings published in the Annals of Rheumatic Diseases.
Still, with the exception of C-section — reported for 42 percent of women with RA and 38 percent of those without RA — the large majority of women did not have these pregnancy complications.
Just under 3 percent of women with RA developed pre-eclampsia, compared with just over 1 percent of women in the comparison group. Eight percent of new moms with RA had a baby weighing less than 5.5 pounds, versus 5.5 percent of the comparison group.
Women with RA were also more likely to have a newborn who was “small for gestational age,” a sign of restricted growth in the womb. The problem was seen in 17 percent of women with RA, and 15 percent of women without the condition.
It is not clear why there is an association between RA and certain problems of pregnancy, according to Dr. Herng-Ching Lin and colleagues at Taipei Medical University.
Although the current study was large and allowed the researchers to account for a number of factors in the odds of pregnancy complications — like the women’s age and family income — it also lacked some important information.
The researchers had no information on the severity of each woman’s RA or medication use during pregnancy. So it’s not possible to tell how those factors might have affected the odds of complications, Lin’s team notes.
A number of RA medications, like methotrexate and leflunomide, may be harmful to the fetus and must be stopped before a woman conceives. But certain other medications, like prednisone and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen, may still be used during pregnancy.
Future studies, Lin’s team writes, should try to determine the roles of RA severity and medication use in the pregnancy complications seen in this study. For now, the findings reinforce the recommendation that women with RA get good prenatal care, with regular visits to their obstetrician and rheumatologist.
- Ectopic Pregnancy: One of the Complications Of Pregnancies
Ectopic pregnancy is one of the pregnancy complications that may occur in some women. The fertilized ovum travels from the fallopian tubule and gets implanted in the uterine lining during a normal pregnancy. In ectopic pregnancy, the fertilized ovum is not implanted in the uterine lining, but may get implanted in the ovary, fallopian tubule, [...]
- Pregnancy, Prenatals, Healthy Baby – What You Need to Know
Pregnancy is such a critical time. A woman’s body is drastically changing and the baby inside is creating new demands on the mother’s body. You want to do everything you can right to make sure that your baby is healthy and has a good start in life.
Some birth defects have been linked to the lack [...] - Childhood asthma in premature babies linked to pregnancy bug
A common complication during pregnancy may predispose children born prematurely to asthma, a large study reports today.
The condition, chorioamnionitis, is inflammation of the fetal membranes and amniotic fluid from a bacterial infection. It is thought to be linked to more than half of all preterm births, before 37 weeks’ gestation, scientists write in today’s Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.
The infection may have ascended to the uterus from the mother’s genital tract or traveled through her bloodstream from a more remote site, such as her gums or upper respiratory tract, says lead author Darios Getahun, a scientist at Kaiser Permanente Southern California’s Department of Research and Evaluation in Pasadena.
In animals, chorioamnionitis has been shown to cause lung and brain damage in offspring, Getahun says. Scientists also have found lung scarring in infants who died after pregnancies complicated by the condition.
Getahun and his co-authors analyzed electronic health records for all singleton children born at Kaiser’s Southern California hospitals in 1991 to 2007, a total of 397,852. Of those, 28,869 were preterm.
Among children born full-term, chorioamnionitis wasn’t linked to an increased risk of being diagnosed with asthma by age 8. But among those born prematurely, the condition was associated with double the risk of childhood asthma in blacks, a 70% increase in Hispanics and a 66% increase in whites. The researchers observed these differences even after accounting for other possible risk factors such as whether the mother smoked or had asthma herself. Only in Asian/Pacific Islanders preemies did chorioamnionitis not seem to make a difference in childhood asthma risk.
Getahun speculates that chorioamnionitis wasn’t related to asthma risk in full-term children because their mothers might not have had it as long as those born prematurely. But, he adds, his team didn’t have information about how early in their pregnancy women were diagnosed.
Diagnosing the condition is tricky, Getahun says, because symptoms — fever in the mother, tenderness or pain in the uterus, foul-smelling amniotic fluid — aren’t definitive, and some women never exhibit symptoms. Getahun’s team is now trying to find a marker in the mother’s blood that would signify her symptoms are because of chorioamnionitis.
A study of 1,096 children published in 2008 found a higher risk of wheezing by age 2 in preemies whose mothers had had chorioamnionitis.
- Treating Mild Pregnancy-Related Diabetes Is Good for Mom, Baby
Women who develop a mild case of gestational diabetes during pregnancy tend to have fewer complications and healthier babies if the diabetes is treated according to the first large-scale randomized trial in the U.S. to address whether such treatment leads to health benefits for mother and child.
As many as 14% of pregnant women in the U.S., or about 200,000 women annually, develop gestational diabetes. This pregnancy-related diabetes can cause the fetus to grow too rapidly, and the excess weight can make delivery difficult and lead to complications. What’s more, gestational diabetes increases the risk of preeclampsia, a potentially life-threatening rise in blood pressure in the mother.
However, the benefits of treating gestational diabetes are somewhat controversial; although most obstetricians screen and treat pregnant women for blood-sugar abnormalities, the 2008 guidelines of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has said there is not enough strong evidence for or against screening and treating gestational diabetes.
“Almost all obstetricians do screen for gestational diabetes, but some of them have not been particularly aggressive about treating milder cases, reserving aggressive treatment for people with higher blood-glucose results,” says lead study author Mark Landon, MD, of Ohio State University Medical Center, in Columbus. “For them, this study serves as notice that aggressive treatment with diet alone is useful for even mild gestational diabetes cases.”
Gestational diabetes can be treated with dietary restrictions, the oral drug metformin, or insulin injections. Dr. Landon says that, unfortunately, some women diagnosed with the condition are not even given a real meal plan to follow; instead they are simply advised to watch their sugar intake.
In the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 958 women diagnosed with mild gestational diabetes between 24 and 31 weeks of pregnancy were divided into two groups; half were treated for diabetes, half were not. Women were considered to have mild gestational diabetes if they had an abnormal result after taking an oral glucose-tolerance test (a test in which women drink a sugary liquid and blood sugar is measured at regular intervals), but their fasting glucose level (a test in which blood sugar is measured after fasting) was below 95 milligrams per deciliter. Many doctors treat gestational diabetes only if it is more severe, generally considered to be 95 milligrams per deciliter or higher.
The new research, a partnership of 14 different institutions, showed that women were half as likely to have larger-than-normal babies if they were treated. For example, 14% of women who weren’t treated had a baby that weighed more than 8 pounds, 13 ounces, compared with only 6% who were treated.
The newborns also had fewer cases of shoulder dystocia (1.5% with treatment vs. 4% without treatment), a potential emergency in which the birthing process stalls due to entrapment of the infant’s shoulders—a problem that’s more likely if a newborn is larger-than-normal. Women who were treated had fewer cases of high blood pressure or preeclampsia (8.6% vs. 13.6%) and were less likely to need a cesarean section (about 27% vs. 33.8%) than women who were not.
Most women in the U.S. are screened for gestational diabetes between 24 to 28 weeks of pregnancy but may be tested even earlier if they are very obese, have a strong family history of the condition, or if they had gestational diabetes or gave birth to a large baby during previous pregnancies. If a one-hour oral glucose test is positive for elevated blood sugar, then women generally undergo a similar three-hour test in order to be diagnosed.
Although gestational diabetes usually goes away after a woman gives birth, women who have the condition are 50% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes within the next 20 years. For that reason, the American Diabetes Association recommends occasional blood-sugar testing, a healthy diet, and regular exercise even after childbirth.
