Pre-term or pre-mature birth can be defined as a baby being born before 37 weeks of pregnancy. Estimated to affect over 10% of births in the US and even higher rates in other regions, it can result in long- and short-term health complications for new-borns.
Traditional methods of assessing pre-term birth risk rely on pregnancy history – more specifically whether a woman has had a pre-term birth before – and exclude first-time mothers. For first-time pregnancies, medical professionals are largely reliant on spotting pre-term birth symptoms rather than conducting risk assessments.
However, a new technique known as ‘quantitative ultrasound’ may pave the way for accurate predictions of pre-term birth risk for first-time mothers and support the reliability of risk-assessments in subsequent pregnancies.
Research and Results:
The new risk assessment technique has been in development for over 20 years, led by researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Called ‘quantitative ultrasound’, it works to measure microstructural changes in a pregnant woman’s cervix to determine preterm birth risk as early as 23-weeks.
Unlike traditional methods or symptom-based assessments, the approach allows medical professionals to make decisions based on objective medical characteristics, regardless of prior pregnancy history.
Within a related study conducted on 429 women who gave birth at the University of Illinois Hospital, quantitative ultrasound was successful in predicting the risk of pre-term birth for both first-time and subsequent pregnancies.
For first-time mothers within the study, the technique produced effective risk assessments. For subsequent pregnancies, the combination of previous birth history and the new ultrasound method gave a more accurate pre-term birth risk assessment in comparison with just using birth history.
Conclusions and Next Steps:
The results of the research certainly represent a significant breakthrough, presenting quantitative ultrasound as a safe and non-invasive method of assessing pre-term birth risk.
The accessibility and affordability of the technique makes it a potentially ideal tool for routine screenings, and further enhance its potential to become a standard component of prenatal care worldwide.
While the ultrasound technique has the potential to enable medical professionals to monitor symptoms and the foetus over a longer period, significant research is still needed on processes by which you can delay the preterm birth and mitigate the related health complications of them.
Sources:
ScienceDaily
University of Illinois, Chicago
