I am now 20 weeks pregnant and early this week i had a small amount of bleeding. My initial thoughts were panic and distress but have now realised that bleeding during pregnancy is much more common and is usually nothing to worry about. Although, I would always recommend going straight to the hospital or contacting your midwife as soon as possible so that they can do all the necessary checks to make sure you and your baby are ok and there are no futher problems it’s always better to be safe than sorry. There isn’t always a reason why women bleed during pregnancy it can sometimes be a little reminder to start taking things easy and rember that you cant be doing all the normal day to day runing about. It is good to remember little things like not do any heavy lifting or carrying and do day to day task at a much easier pace take slow walks into town or the shops rather than rushing around.
- Home
- » Pregnancy
Early pregnancy advice
I have recently discovered that I am pregnant. I am in my seventh week an am feeling the strain of early pregnancy symptoms and seem to be spending more of my time with the toilet than anything else which is very normal at this stage. These are a couple of methods which you may find helpful.
- Eating dry crackers or ginger biscuits in the morning.
- Drinking lemonade or sucking on a lemon.
- If you are feeling sick don’t hold it back it is best just to get it out your system.
I hope that these few things will help you through this difficult stage. I like to think of is as you cant have a rainbow without the rain an it will be more than worth it in the end.
Low hormone levels in pregnancy linked to hard birth
Expectant mums who are low in a hormone made by the thyroid gland in the neck are more likely to struggle in labour, findings suggest. Too little of the hormone thyroxine is already known to complicate pregnancy, increasing the risk of miscarriage, premature birth and pre-eclampsia.
Now a Dutch team has found even “low to normal” levels of thyroxine may cause problems, Clinical Endocrinology says. Babies were more often positioned wrongly, making labour more difficult. Although still head down, the babies tended to face the wrong way – towards their mother’s back rather than stomach.
Not only are these labours generally longer and harder, they are also more likely to end in an assisted delivery with forceps, ventouse or a Caesarean. It does highlight the importance of checking thyroid hormone levels in pregnancy.
The researchers from the University of Tilburg believe the hormone problem is so common – affecting about one in 10 pregnancies – a blood test for it should become a routine part of the antenatal check. In their study of nearly 1,000 apparently healthy mums-to-be, lower levels of thyroxine at 36 weeks of pregnancy was strongly linked to abnormal positioning of the baby’s head and risk of assisted delivery.
Professor Victor Pop and his team believe the relative lack of hormone might stop the unborn child moving as well as it should. This means that instead of getting into the optimal position for labour, the baby is stuck in a more awkward one.
The thyroid gland in the neck makes hormones that regulate metabolism. Too much of these hormones speeds up metabolism causing symptoms like weight loss and anxiety. Too few of the hormones slows metabolism causing problems like fatigue and weight gain. Medication can correct the imbalance
Professor Pop said: “Recent findings have shown that motor development in children at the age of two is related to low levels of thyroid hormone in pregnancy.
“It follows that impaired maternal thyroid function could also influence foetal movement.” The baby is unable to make its own thyroid hormones until 20 weeks into the pregnancy. Before this, it is entirely reliant on its mother’s stores, he said.
Professor Pop said more work was needed to explain the link found and to see if giving pregnant women extra thyroxine, even if they do not have full-blown thyroid disease, would be beneficial. Professor John Lazarus, an expert in endocrinology at Cardiff University School of Medicine, said the link found was not necessarily causal. “However it does highlight the importance of checking thyroid hormone levels in pregnancy.”
Weight Loss
Virtually every woman claims that she wants to lose weight, so those that decide to do something about it there’s then the dilemma about which diet to try, well STOP right there! These diets are often very expensive and don’t actually work.
Diet pills only actually make you lose water because the majority of them contain a diuretic (it makes you pee alot). Some of them can interfere with contraceptives such as the pill. Add into the equation that diet pills are pretty expensive too, for example a packet of alli costs approximately £32.95 for 42 tablets. You have to take 1 3 times a day so a packet of 42 will last 14 days so you end up spending approximately £70 a month.
So here is a link to a website that I found helpful beauty secrets for you. The information on this site is useful provided that you don’t pay attention to the adverts on the page.
Babies ‘cry in mother’s tongue’
According to german researchers babies begin to pick up the nuances of their parents’ accents while still in the womb. They studied the cries of 60 healthy babies born to families speaking French and German. The French newborns cried with a rising “accent” while the German babies’ cries had a falling inflection. They suggest that the babies are probably trying to form a bond with their mothers by imitating them.
The findings suggest that unborn babies are influenced by the sound of the first language that penetrates the womb. It was already known that foetuses could memorise sounds from the outside world in the last three months of pregnancy and were particularly sensitive to the contour of the melody in both music and human voices. Earlier studies had shown that infants could match vowel sounds presented to them by adult speakers, but only from 12 weeks of age.
Kathleen Wermke from the University of Wurzburg, who led the research, said: “The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their foetal life. Newborns are highly motivated to imitate their mother’s behaviour in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding. “Contrary to orthodox interpretations, these data support the importance of human infants’ crying for seeding language development.” Dr Wermke’s team recorded and analysed the cries of 60 healthy newborns when they were three to five days old.
The analysis revealed clear differences in the shape of the infants’ cry melodies that corresponded to their mother tongue. They say the babies need only well-co-ordinated respiratory-laryngeal systems to imitate melody contours and not the vocal control that develops later. Dr Wermke said: “Newborns are highly motivated to imitate their mother’s behaviour in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding. Because melody contour may be the only aspect of their mother’s speech that newborns are able to imitate, this might explain why we found melody contour imitation at that early age.”
Debbie Mills, a reader in developmental cognitive neuroscience at Bangor University, said: “This is really interesting because it suggests that they are producing sounds they have heard in the womb and that means learning and that it is not an innate behaviour. Many of the early infant behaviours are almost like reflexes that go away after the first month and then come back later in a different form. It would be interesting to look at these babies after a month and see if their ability to follow the melodic contours of their language is still there.”
Smoking Mums = problem kids
It is a standard piece of advice during antenatal care to quit smoking and the reason for this is is could cause problems with development. However new research suggests that smoking during pregnancy significantly increases the risk of having a child with behavioural problems.
Writing in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, they say the problems can be evident in children as young as three years old. They believe smoking in pregnancy may damage the developing structure of the baby’s brain. The researchers from the universities of York, Hull and Illinois looked at more than 14,000 mother and child pairs who were taking part in the Millennium Cohort Study. The mothers were categorised as light or heavy smokers depending on how many cigarettes they smoked every day during pregnancy.
They were asked to score their three-year-old children’s behaviour using a questionnaire called Strengths and Difficulties, which focuses on behaviour problems and hyperactivity, or attention deficit disorders. They took into account factors likely to influence the results, including the mother’s age at the child’s birth, her level of education and socioeconomic status, family stability and problematic parenting.
Mothers who were light smokers were 44% more likely to have boys who had problems with their conduct.
Heavy smokers were 80% more likely to have boys with these problems. Both heavy and light smokers were also significantly more likely to have boys who were hyperactive or had attention deficit disorders. For three-year-old girls, light and heavy smoking in pregnancy were significantly associated with conduct problems but not with hyperactivity and attention deficit behaviours.
Professor Kate Pickett, who lead the research, said their findings were consistent with previous research in older age groups. She said: “Smoking in pregnancy may have direct effects on the foetal development of brain structure and functioning which has been shown in studies of rats. “Or it may be a marker for the transmission of processes between the generations that are associated with both smoking in pregnancy and behaviour problems in children.”
“There are four thousand toxic substances in cigarette smoke and many of these will pass into the brain of the foetus and it is possible that they could have an effect on how the brain chemistry works.”
Steep increase in Downs
According to the University of London, the number of Down’s syndrome pregnancies has risen by more than 70% over the last 20 years. These statistics reflect the growing number of older women becoming pregnant, when there is a higher risk. An increase in the number of subsequent abortions and more antenatal diagnoses means slightly fewer children are being born with Down’s syndrome.
The number of Down’s syndrome pregnancies rose from 1,075 diagnoses in 1990 to 1,843 by 2008 in England and Wales. Despite this the number of Down’s pregnancies, the number of babies with Down’s syndrome has fallen by 1%, from 752 to 743. According to the study this is because improved antenatal screening means more Down’s pregnancies are being spotted and more abortions are taking place. Without the improved screening, the number of babies born with Down’s would have risen by 48%.
So what is Down’s syndrome?
A genetic disorder named after the British physician John Langdon Down, who identified it in 1866.
Inhibits the ability to learn and develop mentally.
About 60,000 people have Down’s syndrome in the UK.
Joan Morris, professor of medical statistics at Queen Mary, led the research and she said: “What we’re seeing here is a steep rise in pregnancies with Down’s syndrome but that is being offset by improvements in screening. Doctors told Natasha and Eddie Batha that there was a one-in-170 chance that their daughter Mia, who is now three, would be born with the condition, when it was discovered that Mia did have the condition they realised that it was not as bad as they had feared.
People seem to forget that there is a person behind the label who is just a little bit different, in some cases unless you were told a person has a specific condition you wouldn’t know. It would seem that if people were better informed about things like this then there may be fewer terminations because mothers are led to believe that if their child is diagnosed with something then it is the worst thing ever.
Stop Premature Births!
Research has suggested that a drug used to treat cancer can stop contractions and may prevent premature labour. This research was carried out by a team from Newcastle University, they tested the drug Trichostatin A on tissue taken from 36 women undergoing a caesarean. They claim that it worked by increasing the levels of a protein that controls muscle relaxation.
Preterm labour and birth is the single biggest cause of death in infants in the developed world, around 1,500 babies die in the UK every year. There are a number of drugs which are used to attempt to stop early labour but research has shown them to have serious side effects.
The researchers got permission to take samples of the muscles of women undergoing caesarean sections at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle. They exposed the muscle to TSA, a dfrug used to treat cancer, and measured the effects on both spontaneous contractions and those induced by the labour drug, oxytocin.
They recorded an average 46% reduction in contractions for the spontaneously contracting tissue and an average 54% reduction in the oxytocin induced contractions.
Professor Jane Norman, a spokeswoman for the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (RCOG), said: “At the moment, it’s not possible to treat preterm labour effectively. We only have drugs that delay it by 24 hours or so – not enough to deliver the baby safely. There are experts who say that until doctors understand the cause of premature labour there is no way to develop a successful a treatment.
Of course as with any research there are those who feel that premature labour and birth can’t be or shouldn’t be prevented as the body has started labour early for a reason therefore doctors shouldn’t mess with nature. However mothers who have lost a baby because they were born prematurely would disagree and would claim that their child’s life should have been saved.
Get your figure back
We’ve all heard of these celebrities that seem to snap back into a size zero within a week or two of giving birth, using extreme fitness regimes or diets. However for the rest of it’s not going to happen that fast unless you are really lucky.
So how do we shift the weight we’ve gained whilst carrying that little bundle of joy? Well as we all know breastfeeding is a good start, because it releases chemicals which help the uterus to contract. Other things that you can do is going for walks, this not only benefits you physically but it is also good mentally as it gets you out of the house and the excercise releases endorphines which elevates your mood.
Here are a few excercises that will help you get into shape:
- Swing-Sitting cross-legged, have your baby in your lap. Hold on to their chest as you rock backwards and forwards to provide a gentle workout for your abs.
- Seesaw-Whilst sitting on the floor with your knees bent and your feet flat on the floor, place your baby on your lower legs. Now lie back as you do so lift your legs, then lift and lower your baby a few times. Then using your stomach muscles return to a sitting position
I still do the seesaw with my 2 year old except she calls it the aeroplane. All I can say is be patient and take it at your own pace, I’ve only just managed to shift my baby weight and my youngest is nearly 5 months.
Diet also plays a big part in shifting the bulge by eating sensibly and exercising regularly you will be able to shift the bulge in a few months. Obviously if you have had a C section or other complications such as SPD then please take it easy and don’t over do it otherwise you won’t be able to enjoy your new arrival.
Anti-depressant pregnancy risk
Research has shown that in 20% of pregnant women suffer from depression of these 1% of these children have a small but important increased risk of heart defects. Although the overall risk is very low and women should speak to doctors before stopping their drugs. It is worth pointing out that if you have taken antidepressants a specialist scan is sometimes offered to check your baby’s heart and that there are other treatments that don’t require the use of drugs.
It is not all doom and gloom if your baby does have a heart defect as some spontaneously resolve without medical intervention. Speaking as a mother who took anti depressants during the first trimester I can assure you that this risk is very small so there is no need to launch into a major panic. As long as the professionals involved in your care are aware that you have/are taking the antidepressants, they will take this into consideration when deciding on the best plan of action.