To Be Mom

During pregnancy women who get into depression could have premature births, so to prevent this there have been many treatments given.

From Institute of Psychiatry in London, Veronica O’Keane and her colleagues have found out a link between clinical depression and levels of stress hormones and premature birth. They have found out that woman who are expecting and suffering from severe depression had higher levels of the stress hormones cortisol and corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH) in their blood than healthy women. They even found out that pregnancies were shorter on average in the depressed women. Preterm delivery is the leading cause of infant illness and then death.

As O’Keane says;

Depression is a major cause of preterm birth, and over stimulation of stress hormones is at least one cause of this.

Well, I am sure this research will help out all the expecting mums.

Via: newscientist

During pregnancy, mothers-to-be may feel uneasy taking medications. However, if a pregnant woman has asthma, it is doubly important that her symptoms be well-managed to increase both her health and her baby’s health. Uncontrolled asthma can be a threat to maternal well-being, fetal growth as well as survival.

According to the American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, (ACAAI), nearly eight percent of women in their childbearing years are asthmatic.

When women who have asthma become pregnant, their symptoms may differ, asserts ACAAI.

1. Women with severe problem develop worse symptoms while, women with mild asthma might experience some improvement.

2. Signs that asthmatic women develop in their first pregnancy tend to resurface during ensuing pregnancies.

3. The most severe asthma symptoms are more pronounced between 24 and 36 weeks of pregnancy.

4. A woman’s asthma symptoms usually regress to pre-pregnancy symptoms within three months of giving birth.

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Teens, whose mothers used to smoke during pregnancy and now themselves are smokers, may have higher chances of attention related problems.

A new study came up with this finding after studying the effects of nicotine exposure on the attention of the teens in which some teens were exposed to nicotine smoke in the womb, while some weren’t. Moreover, some teens were smoker while some weren’t. To measure the effect teens were asked to perform a series of tests and 63 of the teens had brain scans while they took the tests.

During the course of study, experts found that performance of the teen- smokers who were exposed to cigarette smoke in the womb was worst, while the performance of non-smokers, who were also not exposed to nicotine smoke in the womb, was commendable. In addition, teens either who smoked or whose mother smoked during pregnancy fell between the above-mentioned two categories.

Another interesting thing, which sprang out from this study reveals that where nicotine exposure in girls showed both visual and auditory attention deficits, while in boys difficulty in listening appeared as the main side effect.

On the basis of this finding it could be said that where exposure to nicotine affects only auditory development in males, while in girls it affects bother visual and auditory development. In addition, it would also not be wrong to say that pregnant moms should strictly stay away from both active as well as passive smoking because it is neither good for them (mothers) nor for their babies, no matter it is male or female.

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Via: Reuters

A British woman’s longing for having a child of her own may never come true. The woman has been fighting a four-year legal battle to use frozen embryos fertilized by her former partner was disappointed again when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that she could not use them without the consent of former fiance.

Natalie Evans was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when she began taking fertility in 2000. She had to freeze six embryos in a fertility clinic as she underwent a surgery to get her ovaries removed.

The couple split up in 2002 and Johnston, her former fiance wrote to fertility clinic with drawing his consent to use the embryos. The British lady then moved to the court seeking permission to have the embryos implanted in order to have a child. Under current British law, both the man and woman have to give their consent at every stage of IVF treatment.

The grand chamber came to the conclusion as the consent was required from both parties thought it was a fair judgment to both concerned. The embryos however will remain in the fertility clinic until the legal fight is finally over after which they would be destroyed if Ms.Evans lost her final battle.

As much as I respect the privacy of these individuals and their choices, I strongly believe that no woman should be denied the wonderful opportunity of being a mother to her own child.

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More and more women are becoming career minded and hence they are opting to surrogacy. Keen to become mothers and yet not willing to put their careers on hold, these career-driven women have given a new twist to the concept of outsourcing.

Dr Sunita Tandulwadkar, Chief IVF (In-Vitro Fertilisation) Consultant and Endoscopist at Ruby Hall Clinic, Pune stated,

We have got two cases in the recent past of career women who opted for surrogate wombs so that there wouldn’t be any break in their careers. One is a 32-year-old woman based in Singapore. She has taken the surrogate woman with her to Singapore for delivery. The second is a woman based in South India and working in the IT industry.

The budding trend is giving rise to numerous sociological issues, like,

A. Are women trying to sidestep the challenge of bearing children?
B. Has the pressure of balancing a home and career begun to take its toll?
C. Do people believe that in an era of consumerism, everything can be bought?

Well, if we talk about India alone, the cost of surrogacy is very less comparatively. Some have condemned it as ‘women outsourcing their motherhood’ but if we look at the other side, I feel that women are not doing any kind of offense in being a surrogate mother. After all, they are bringing smiles to childless families.

Provided, that the health risks associated with the process must be meted out effectively. Also exploitation, which is linked with it, worries me.

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Eating apples during pregnancy may protect children against developing asthma later in life; experts from the Netherlands and Scotland after tracking dietary intake by nearly 2,000 pregnant moms came up with this notion.

During the course of study, they found that children of mothers with sufficient intake of apple had significantly reduced risk of developing asthma and childhood wheezing. However, the way apple consumption staves off asthma symptoms is still not very clear.

Still, saying that it is quite a significant finding won’t be wrong.

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Via: Earth Times

Pregnant women who take vitamin supplements can reduce the risk of having an underweight baby. A study was conducted on over 8,500 women in Tanzania; half of them received vitamin supplements and the rest got placebos. The percentage of low birth weight baby was more among the placebo recipients when compared to women who took supplements.

Babies of low birth weight are more likely to die young, have growth and learning difficulties and may later be prone to diabetes and heart disease. About 20 million low birth-weight babies are born each year, 96 percent of them in developing countries and the researchers suggested that all pregnant women in the developing countries take the vitamin supplements.

In light of these findings, we recommend that multivitamins be considered for all pregnant women in developing countries, regardless of their HIV status

says Wafaie Fawzi of Harvard University’s School of Public Health.

Most developing countries provide prenatal iron and folate supplements to pregnant women free of cost but do not give vitamin supplements; the researchers say that by providing the vitamin supplements in addition to the iron supplements, the developing countries can reduce the percentage of low birth-weight babies in their countries.

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Parents planning to have a child at an older age might be risky as they are at risk of having an autistic child. Research has found that there is a link between parent’s age and autism.

A study was conducted on autistic children and found that when compared with parents between 25 and 29 years of age, mothers and fathers who were 40 years of age or older were 27 percent and 52 percent more likely, respectively, to have a child with an ASD though the researchers emphasize that the chances of having a child with ASD are small.

A number of studies have looked at the impact of maternal age on autism, but the results have been inconsistent. Paternal age has been much less studied and our findings support a link between advanced (parental) age and autism, although the effect on risk is small

lead author Dr. Lisa A. Croen told Reuters Health.

Previous research has also shown supporting a link and the fact that a number of childhood diseases are associated with advanced parental age. The team is using this data to conduct further studies and publish their findings.

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Experts have postulated that stress and depression during pregnancy is directly proportional to premature birth. Hormones which are related to stress play an important part in the development of unborn baby and this tends to shoot up in women who are in depression during pregnancy.

High levels of these hormones are involved in triggering labor, leading scientists to believe they could be behind many of the 45,000 premature births that occur in the UK each year - with potentially devastating results.

Premature babies tend to die within the first few weeks of their births and if any amongst them survive, they tend to live with health problems such as, lung disease, cerebral palsy, blindness or deafness.

Dr Veronica O’Keane, a specialist in mental health in pregnancy, stated ‘many thousands’ of the unexplained premature births are likely to be caused by soaring levels of stress hormones and they could be prevented by treating stress and depression in pregnancy.

Dr O’Keane, pointed out that it’s myth that women do not under go depression during pregnancy and that they are their ‘happiest’ mood. However, pregnancy is a stage when women under goes various mood swings and hence, depression comes as a part of pregnancy.

Work carried out by Dr O’Keane and presented at a London conference held by the Institute of Psychiatry, hinted that children whose mothers become depressed during pregnancy find it harder to handle stress themselves.

Therefore, stress in any given day is not only good for the would-be mother after all it affects the mental health of the progeny as well.

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How much gain in the body weight is good for moms during pregnancy, this question seems to be getting under scrutiny this time, with the news unveiling that women who gained the recommended amount of weight ran four times the risk of having a child who was overweight at age 3, compared to women who gained less than the advised amount. Moreover, outcomes were same in the women who gained more than the recommended amount of weight.

Findings of this study have sparked a new question that what a pregnant mom should do. Should she not meet the requirement of recommended weight gain? Well, experts believe that no doubt, further investigation on this issue is required but they also not stay away from advising that pregnant moms should not try to gain less weight than recommended, as it may prove harmful for the kid. However, this fact can also not be spurned away that if moms gain weight in excess during pregnancy then too they may invite serious complications like prolonged obesity. Moreover, gaining too much weight increases the risk for having a baby that is too large, leading to a difficult delivery or Caesarean section, etc.

The best answer to this question seems that neither pregnant moms should gain weight that is less than recommended nor more than recommended, but as recommended by the Gynecologists. As stated by Lisa Bodner, an assistant professor of epidemiology and obstetrics-gynecology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health:

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Via: Xinhua Net