It is a worry of most expectant parents, “will my baby be born premature?”. We try to do everything we can to prevent it from happening, but more and more babies are being born preterm. According to a new study released by The Institute of Medicine one in every eight babies born in the United States if premature. That works out to an astounding 500,000 premature babies every year. What may be an even more astounding number are the health care costs associated with preterm babies, a whopping $26 billion a year.

Unfortunately, these numbers are not likely to improve any time soon. What causes a baby to arrive preterm remains mostly a mystery to the medical community. Little is known about what women and their caregivers can do to prevent a preterm birth and there is no way for the medical community to predict which women are likely to deliver a premature baby.

A full term birth occurs when the baby is delivered between the 38th and 42nd weeks of pregnancy. A baby is considered premature if it is delivered before the end of the 37th week of pregnancy, with those born before the 32nd week being at the greatest risk. Although little is known about what is causing the increase in preterm births there are a few known risk factors that expectant parents should be aware of, they include:

• Women who have had a previous premature birth are at risk of having a second.
• Women expecting multiples are at an increased risk.
• Your ethnicity can impact your risk of a preterm birth. 17.8% babies born to African-American women are premature compared with 11.5% for white women and 11.9% for Hispanic women.
• Certain types of fertility treatments can also increase your risk including babies conceived through in-vitro fertilization.
• Your age is also a factor with women under the age of 16 or over the age of 35 being at an increased risk of delivering preterm.
• Your economic status can also having a bearing with poor women being at an increased risk, thought to be because of a lack of prenatal care.
• Other risk factors include, diet, exercise, stress during pregnancy, consumption of alcohol, and smoking

The study released by the Institute of Medicine makes a call for more research into the causes of premature births and what can be done to prevent more preterm births. They also make a couple of recommendation that should impact the occurrence of preterm births.

• Doctors should conduct more first-trimester ultrasounds to more accurately age the fetus. It is thought this would help prevent a woman from being induced or given a caesarean section before the pregnancy is full term.
• Strengthening of the guidelines that reduce the number of multiple births as a result of infertility treatment, since multiples significantly increase a women’s risk of delivering preterm.

Premature birth can have a big impact on the child and the family. Prevention is the best solution, anything that can be done to decrease the instances of preterm births and give women more information regarding what they can do to prevent their own pregnancy from ending preterm will be a wonderful thing.

For more information regarding premature birth visit the March of Dimes.