Obstetric gestational age
In the old days, the gestation period was calculated in months, while modern doctors prefer to calculate it on a weekly basis. On the one hand, this allows you to achieve greater accuracy, which is necessary, for example, to conduct certain studies. On the other hand, it leads to some confusion.
Obstetric gestational age
Both methods of calculation are correct, but the second is the most widespread. According to the obstetric calendar, labor occurs 280 days after the start of the last menstrual period. That is, after 40 weeks or 10 lunar months. And although it is on this day that only 4% of all babies are born, this method of calculating the weeks of pregnancy was recognized as the most convenient, so there is nothing strange about the new five-week pregnancy.
Sometimes doctors record the gestational age as 7 + 5. This record can be deciphered as 7 weeks + 5 days, that is, the woman is in the 8th week of pregnancy
Sometimes, when determining the duration of pregnancy, a not very clear situation arises. The woman comes to see the doctor a few days after the delay in menstrual bleeding, and he congratulates her on her five-week pregnancy, thereby causing considerable surprise to the patient. How can you be pregnant in the second month if not even a couple of weeks have passed since conception? And then the elderly nurse writes a record of pregnancy for a period of three weeks on the card. Then you will inevitably decide that one of them is crazy or deliberately misleading. So which of them puts the deadline correctly? And the fact is that there are several different ways to determine the timing of pregnancy.
Currently, the gestational age is calculated in weeks, and not in months, as it used to be. If we take the moment of conception as the beginning of pregnancy, which seems quite logical, then we can say that the child in the womb matures in 266 days, that is, 38 weeks. Therefore, the nurse who wrote down the information about three weeks on the card turns out to be right. This method of calculating weeks is called the calendar or real gestational age.
Calculations of obstetric gestational age can be complicated by the irregularity of a woman’s menstrual cycle. In this case, other methods of determining the age of the embryo are taken into account, for example, using ultrasound
Obstetric gestational age
It remains only to doubt the competence of the doctor. And really, maybe he just does not know how to count? But, oddly enough, the doctor also cannot be accused of unprofessionalism. The thing is that in his calculations he uses a completely different way of counting weeks and determines the so-called obstetric term. This is done for one simple reason. In order not to guess on which day conception occurred, the beginning of pregnancy is considered to be the first day of the last menstrual cycle. Thus, it is possible to bring the calculations to a convenient standard, and the fact that in the first two weeks of pregnancy a woman is not even pregnant at all does not bother anyone.
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