Seems like your baby was born too young? Remember if you were cold during pregnancy.
Deviations from the norm in weight in newborn babies are more and more common. Often, genetics, the lifestyle of parents before and during pregnancy, intrauterine infections, the state of health of the expectant mother and the child himself are to blame for this. But when there are no objective reasons for the effect on the fetus, scientists begin to look for other factors of influence. For example, in the external environment. And sometimes they come to very interesting results.
So, scientists from the National Institute of Children’s Health and Human Development in the United States, finding out why full-term babies weighing less than 2,5 kilograms are born, decided to pay attention to … the weather. They analyzed information on 220 thousand babies born in 19 hospitals in the country from 2002 to 2008. First of all, they were interested in the weather accompanying the appearance of crumbs into the world.
And they didn’t just check to see if the sun was shining or it was raining on the day of birth. Then they would no longer be scientists. Appreciate a truly titanic work: for each newborn, they calculated the average air temperature in each trimester of pregnancy, as well as the average air temperature throughout the pregnancy.
The conclusions were astounding. It turned out that women who carry a baby in extremely hot or abnormally cold weather (of course, relative to their place of residence) run the risk of giving birth to a baby with a low weight even for more than 37 weeks.
Scientists concluded that if it was too cold during the second and third trimesters or too hot during the third trimester, the risk of giving birth to a “lightweight” increased by 18-31 percent. If the abnormal weather lasted all nine months, the likelihood of the birth of a baby with a low weight increases 2,5 times or even more. And these results were not influenced by any other factors, such as the sex of the child, the mother’s weight, or heredity.
“We do not yet know the reasons for this phenomenon,” the Live Science portal quotes the lead author of the study, Paulina Mendola. – It is possible that at extreme temperatures, blood flow to the uterus decreases and this affects the growth of the fetus. These results indicate the need for additional research.
In addition, biologists want to know if women were at home during abnormal periods or walked a lot. Have you used air conditioners or heaters. It may sound absurd to us, but for scientists it is a potentially significant factor affecting a child’s health. In the meantime, scientists recommend that expectant mothers sit out stifling heat or strong cold at home.