After falling 8 percent from 2007 to 2014, the preterm rate has increased for the second year in a row according to new data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Some of the reasons for these statistics include: lack of prenatal care, obesity, tobacco use and some fertility treatments can all lead to early births. Teenagers and women who have babies spaced too closely together also have higher rates of preterm birth.
The NCHS team found that women of Asian ethnic origin had the lowest rates of preterm births, at 8.6 percent, while Black women had the highest rates, at 13.75 percent of all births.
What’s even more startling is that fact that even if you’re no longer a smoker, but have smoked in your younger years, it can still affect your pregnancy years later. A new study suggests a woman's risk of having a baby with a low birth weight is higher if she starts smoking in her teens.
That's because women who start smoking as teens are far more likely to smoke during pregnancy, which increases the risk of having a smaller baby.
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In turn, babies who havelow birth weights are more likely to have physical and mental problems later in life.
"Historically, the literature has focused on risk factors operative within the prenatal or immediate preconception period," explained study leader Jennifer Kane, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine.
"A key contribution of our report is that we look further back in time – before women even become pregnant – and identify earlier maternal life events and risk factors that could set in motion a series of events that ultimately lead to poor health at birth among offspring," she added in a university news release.
Researchers analyzed data from a long-term U.S. government study of nearly 21,000 women who were seventh- through 12th-graders in 1994-95. The researchers linked a chain of risks to low birth weight: teen smoking; poor grades in high school; having children without being married; depression; and binge drinking.
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Of those risk factors, smoking during the teen years was the strongest.
"The odds ratio linking teen smoking to prenatal smoking was the largest observed," said Kane.
"Those who smoked prior to pregnancy were eight times more likely to smoke while pregnant. To reduce adverse birth outcomes, efforts to prevent adolescent uptake of smoking should be redoubled. In so doing, we may be able to disrupt the transmission of disadvantages from parents to children that are passed along through poor birth outcomes," she said.
If you are pregnant and have a history of smoking, know that there are options and additional information available to you. Find out more about preterm birth on our Health Conditions tab on BlackDoctor.org.
SOURCE: University of California, Irvine, news release, Aug. 1, 2018
