Nutrition and Supplements

Now that you’re eating for two, this is not the time to cut your calories need. It is vice versa, your body needs about extra 300 calories each day, especially in later pregnancy stages, when the growth of baby becomes quicker. If you are thin, active, or carrying twins or multiples, you’ll need even more. But if you are already overweight, your doctor may suggest you to consume optimum calories.

Healthy eating is always important, especially during the days of pregnancy. So, make sure your must obtain calories come such nutritious foods which also contribute to your baby’s growth and development.

Try to maintain a well-balanced diet that incorporates the dietary guidelines including:

• Lean meats
• Fruits
• Vegetables
• Whole-grain breads
• Low-fat dairy product

Calcium

Most women 19 and older, including expecting mothers, don’t often meet with their calcium requirement need that is, 1,000 mg of calcium a day. Because your growing baby’s calcium requirements are high, you should increase your calcium intake to prevent a loss of calcium from your own bones. Your doctor will also likely prescribe prenatal vitamins for you, which may contain some extra calcium.

Iron

Most of the women suffer anemia during pregnancy as the need of iron get increase to 30 mg during pregnancy. Since iron is the key element in the making of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying component of red blood cells (RBCs). RBCs circulate throughout the body to deliver oxygen and food material to all body cells.

Iron deficiency cause the lesser amount of RBCs than required and the body’s tissues and organs won’t get the enough oxygen. So it’s especially essential for pregnant women to get enough iron in their daily diets for themselves and their growing babies.

Folic Acid or Folate

Studies have found that consumption of folic acid 1 month prior to first trimester of pregnancy minimize the risk of neural tube defects, up to 70%.

The neural tube formed after few weeks of the pregnancy, possibly before a woman even knows she’s pregnant, and made the brain and spinal cord of the developing baby. When the neural tube have any abnormality, it could the result is a neural tube defect such as spina bifida.

When expecting women take, 30 minutes break for relaxing music each day, their stress and depression reduce dramatically, Taiwanese researchers said.

“Pregnancy is a unique and stressful period for many expectant mothers and they suffer anxiety and depression because of the long time period involved. Any intervention that reduces these problems is to be welcomed.” said Chen, National Cheng Kung University in Tainan.

Chen’s team divides 236 pregnant women in a music group and a group without music along with standard parental care. Women in the music group were free to enjoy music of their own choice for 30 minutes per day for two weeks; the music included classical, lullabies, nature sounds and children’s music.

At the start and end of the study, all pregnant women filled questionnaires on stress, anxiety and depression symptoms.

After completion, the researchers found that the women in the music group showed a significant improvement in all three symptoms, while stress, anxiety and depression scores remained virtually unchanged in the comparison group.

Music may provide “sensory input” that affects the nervous systems, which could pacify the physiological response to daily stress, according to Chen’s team.

Whatever is the mechanism, music may provide a simple, inexpensive and risk free way to control stress of pregnancy, researcher said.

“The value of music therapy is slowly being realized by nurses in a number of clinical settings,” Chen said, “and we hope that our findings will encourage healthcare professionals to consider it when treating pregnant women.”

This article is the property of http://www.HealthHeap.com
Copying and publishing any article from our site is strictly NOT allowed

But Monday’s research used specialized lab tests to find out microbes, which missed by ordinary methods, and exposed more women with prevalent infections than previously estimated.

The intensity of infection increases the chances of a woman to deliver underweight, sicker baby, researchers reported.

“We don’t think any organisms belong in the amniotic sac,” said Dr. David Relman, the study’s author. “You’d have to assume there’s something wrong.”

Around one million babies are born premature per year, yet doctors are unaware of the cause of most preterm births. Those born before 32 weeks suffer the greatest risk of mortality or severe disabilities.
Vaginal or urinary tract infections (UTI) are well-known to raise the risk of premature birth, apparently by causing inflammation that consecutively triggers labor.

But infections play how much role, particularly those that don’t cause superficial symptoms, has been a key question, said Dr. Michael Katz, who wasn’t part of the new study.

So the Stanford team tried a different school of thought.

They collect saved samples of amniotic fluid of women who had preterm labor at a Detroit hospital between 1998 and 2002. Around 15 percent of the women infected with bacteria or fungi, and those who did all delivered prematurely. Relman used more advance testing known as PCR to find and reproduce bits of genetic material from germs. By adding PCR tests, 56 percent more infected women detected than standard testing.

“It’s a very, very important first step, but there are still many hurdles” the researchers said.

Now researchers are trying to know that, can harboring germs predicts who will go into preterm labor? Now Relman’s team is studying 2,000 women who get routine amniocentesis in their second trimester, to answer that.

If so, then the questions will arise, where those germs instigate, whether there’s a simple way to find who’s at risk, and if there’s any treatment that might help.

This article is the property of http://www.HealthHeap.com
Copying and publishing any article from our site is strictly NOT allowed

Doctors in Scotland tested ovulation stimulating drug and artificial insemination against completely untreated couples who had no clear reasons of infertility.

Researchers found minute difference in the number of couples who had babies, among the three groups. The study was published Friday in the British Medical Journal.

”These treatments are a leap of faith,” said Dr. Siladitya Bhattacharya, the study’s lead author. ”None of the treatments studied had shown any significant benefit over without treatment at all.”

Infertility affects one out of seven couples. Doctors frequently try fertility pills or artificial insemination prior to moving on to more complex and expensive methods such as in-vitro fertilization. Bhattacharya said that “he and the five study centers no longer recommend the two tested treatments for unexplained infertility problems.”

First group consisted of the 580 couples in the study were simply advised to have regular sex. Second group got clomifene citrate, which stimulates the process of ovulation. For the third group, artificial insemination is performed, injecting sperm into the uterus with the help of syringe.
Women who were pregnant after six months were then monitored till the time of delivery.

In the untreated group who were only recommended regular sex, 32 couples had babies. That compares to 26 babies for the women who took fertility pills and 43 for those who had artificial insemination. Experts said the differences are statistically negligible.

”It’s not in the realm that you would expect it to be if these interventions were really performing,” said Allan Pacey, of the University of Sheffield and secretary of the British Fertility Society.

Still, Pacey said that “artificial insemination was still useful in certain conditions, such as when donor sperm is used.”

Fertility pills like clomifene have long been shown to stimulate ovulation with side effects include nausea, headaches, and hot flashes. These fertility drugs also increases the chance of having twins.

This article is the property of http://www.HealthHeap.com
Copying and publishing any article from our site is strictly NOT allowed

Women of developing countries are delaying childbirth till the age of infertility is about to strike. Consequently, most of them are adopting the assisted reproductive technologies to conceive. High risk of adverse health outcomes in infants has been associated with the assisted fertilization, but it is hard to differentiate between the effects of the procedure itself from the effects, that might be inherent in the birthing couple.

To differentiate between these two effects, reasearchers performed a population-based group study, selecting women older than 20 who had one singleton pregnancy and one after AF. Then infants were examined for birth weight, gestational age, premature birth, and perinatal deaths from 2,546 Norwegian women over 20. These results were compared with rates in 1,200,922 single birth controls and 8,229 AF controls.

It showed that AF conception was related to:

• lower average birth wight by 25 g
• shorter gestation period by 2.0 days
• 26 percent elevated risk of being undersized for gestational age
• 31% percent risk of perinatal death.

Women in whom, factors, other than AF were controlled i.e. the women who had conceived both spontaneously and by AF, the AF babies had:

• a lower average birth weight by 9 g
• a shorter gestation period by 0.6 days
• a similar risk of being undersized for gestational age
• a 200 percent increased risk of perinatal death.

The researchers conclude that “Birthweight, gestational age, preterm delivery and risks for short gestational age, did not differ among infants of women who had conceived in both ways. The adverse outcomes of assisted fertilization that we noted compared with those in the general population could therefore be attributable to the factors leading to infertility, rather than to factors related to the reproductive technology.”

This article is the property of http://www.HealthHeap.com
Copying and publishing any article from our site is strictly NOT allowed

The study is the largest of its own type, and gives the most latest and detailed information to date on birth defects that occur to infants of diabetic mothers, including heart defects, omitted kidneys and spine disfigurement.

Nearly 40 types of birth defects enlisted during study, which found to be considerably more common in the infants of diabetic mothers than normal or who were diagnosed with diabetes after conceiving.

The study’s list of diabetes-associated birth defects is astounding. It is much longer than was previously understood, said Janis Biermann, senior vice president for education and health promotion at the March of Dimes.

“It adds more information about the specific types of birth defects associated with pre-gestational diabetes and gestational diabetes,” he added.

Birth defects affect one out of 33 babies born in the U.S, and cause around one in five infant deaths. Causes of most birth defects are not known but some risk factors may involve including obesity, alcohol, smoking, infections, gestational and pre-gestational diabetes.

From decades, doctors know about the threat diabetes poses to pregnancies. Previous research has focused on threats to the infant by the excessive amounts of glucose (sugar) circulating in the womb of a diabetic mother. Studies upon rats and mice have clearly shown that high sugar level harms fetal tissue development, said Dr. E. Albert Reece, a study co-author and dean of the University of Maryland school of Medicine, who directs birth defects research there.

The study concentrated on the 13,000 births involving a major birth defect, in comparison with nearly 5,000 arbitrarily selected healthy births from the same locations.

Mothers were asked if they had been diagnosed with diabetes before or during their pregnancy. The researchers said those who were diagnosed during pregnancy either had pregnancy-induced condition called gestational diabetes or had undiagnosed pre-pregnancy diabetes.

The study found that in 93% of birth defect diabetes was not involved. About 2 percent of the infants with single birth defects were born to mothers who had pre-pregnancy diabetes. About 5 percent of the children with more than one defect were born to mothers with same condition. The percentage of healthy births was much lower in those mothers who were diabetic before pregnancy.

“Diabetes is not discriminating” in which birth defects it’s linked to, said Dr. Adolfo Correa, a CDC epidemiologist who was the study’s lead author.

This article is the property of http://www.HealthHeap.com
Copying and publishing any article from our site is strictly NOT allowed