Genomic Functions – Health News

Posts Tagged ‘Pregnancy’

When pregnancy comes a new chapter in the lives of women. The joys associated with it are remarkable, but there are also some bad. One of them is the pain that the physical changes of pregnancy occur, one of the most striking back pain caused by the weight of the fetus.

For this, as is well known, there are complementary therapies that help the mother to overcome those pesky inconveniences of this period. Chiropractic and acupuncture are the most popular alternatives.

Backaches are very common in many pregnant women, and often accentuated mostly in the lower back. This is where the counter increases, and also in the pelvis, which also suffers from pain. To avoid this and live a normal pregnancy, acupuncture is an excellent solution.

Publishing in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, a group of researchers have worked with 159 pregnant women were divided into three groups: one received treatment for auricular (ear acupuncture), one received acupuncture treatment at points of fake body, and another that received no treatment. Read the rest of this entry »

Most women should begin to control their weight during pregnancy to avoid gaining weight too much and risking their babies, experts said. A U.S. team found that women who gained more weight during pregnancy gave birth to heavier babies, putting them at greater risk of becoming obese adults. Large birth weight also more predisposed to cancer, allergies and asthma.

“The study suggests that the best time to start preventing obesity would indeed before birth, with a focus on weight gain and diet of the mother during pregnancy,” said Dr. David Ludwig of Children’s Hospital Boston, who worked on the study published in The Lancet.

Ludwig and Janet Currie, an economist at Columbia University in New York, looked at data on all babies born in Michigan and New Jersey for a period of 15 years between 1989 and 2003. The authors analyzed 1.1 million women and 513,500 babies.
“Women who gained 50 pounds (24 kilos) had twice the risk of giving birth to a baby with high birth weight, compared to up 20 pounds (10 kilos),” said Ludwig. Babies born to women who gained more than 50 pounds during pregnancy were about 150 grams heavier than babies of women who gained 20 pounds or less. Read the rest of this entry »

The idea that small babies at birth are at risk of adults with high cholesterol is applicable only for children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy. There is increasing evidence of the relationship between being born small for gestational age (SGA, for its acronym in English) and high cholesterol in adulthood, said Wen Xiaozhong, of Harvard Medical School in Boston.

But with his team wondered whether this risk is increased in certain groups of people born SGA or the lowest 10 percentile for gestational age. Could the size at birth to overcome the influence of environmental factors that trigger this condition coexisting, which generates heart disease and cerebrovascular accident (CVA)? For example, maternal smoking during pregnancy is a major determinant of SGA in developed countries.

The team studied the records of birth and cholesterol levels of 1,370 adults aged 39 on average. 25 percent (345) said he had high cholesterol (34 percent in adults born SGA and 24 percent of those born at normal size). But only in adults born SGA and whose mothers had smoked during pregnancy was high risk for high cholesterol.

After eliminating other factors that could cause confusion, participants who had been exposed to excessive smoke snuff in the womb (at least 20 cigarettes daily) were 2.5 times more likely to have high cholesterol. Read the rest of this entry »

The fish oil capsules are an economical way of eating omega-3 fatty acids, but do not prevent postpartum depression. Nor improve the mental development of babies, says a team from Australia that tested the effect of daily use of these supplements during the second half of pregnancy, the period in which the fetal brain develops.

The team were given more than 2,000 women a dose of vegetable oil or fish with docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which could improve pregnancy outcomes according to previous studies. “Before the widespread use of DHA in pregnancy, it is important to know not only if it has any benefit, but if you have any risk to mother or baby,” he writes in the Journal of the American Medical Association team Maria Makrides of Women and Children’s Hospital North Adelaide, Australia.

But the authors have come too late. They found that one third of the women studied and took fish oil supplements, according to medical advice. The good news was that the only adverse effect found was the removal of gases, which was twice as common in fish oil with vegetable oil. But the bad news was that fish oil did not improve the mood of women after childbirth, 10 per cent of participants in both groups said they felt high levels of depressive symptoms. Read the rest of this entry »