Pregnancy –
Recommendations to help prevent Birth Defects and have Healthy Babies
April 20th, 2006
|
 |
|
Pregnancy |
|
Healthy babies and
mothers are improved with routine medical visits and being educated
about any potential health dangers.
A report was
published in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s
journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Recommendations and
Reports. This report recommends specific goals to help improve the
health of the mother and the baby.
Steps that are
recommended for example are to educate women of the dangers of smoking
and drinking alcohol during pregnancy. Women should take folic acid to
reduce serious birth defects such as spina bifida.
Visits to the
doctor before a women becomes pregnant can help determine if the woman has
any chronic diseases. If they diagnose diabetes, asthma, or high blood
pressure early on it can help to insure a healthy pregnancy.
Planning your
pregnancy can be extremely important if you are taking certain
medications. One acne prescription can cause birth defects and is
monitored for women that could get pregnant on a monthly basis. You may
have to discontinue or change certain medications before you get
pregnant.
"We could do much
more to improve the health of mothers and babies if we could identify
risk factors before pregnancy and educate women about what health
changes they can make," said Janis Biermann who is the co-author of the
study and vice president for Education and Health Promotion of the March
of Dimes. "For some of these problems, the preconception period, or the
time between pregnancies, is the only chance to make a difference."
They warn that
women in early pregnancy may not be aware that she is pregnant and there
are many serious birth defects that can occur early in pregnancy.
Preventing birth defects is a primary focus of this report.
The report asks
for the following changes in education and medical services:
-
Have every
woman to have a reproductive life plan.
-
Educate the
public about preconception health.
-
Offer risk
assessment and counseling during primary care visits.
-
Increase the
number of women that get interventions after risk screening.
-
Increase time
inbetween pregnancies especially for women that had a previous
pregnancy that ended in infant death, low birthweight, or premature
birth.
-
Recommend one
pre-pregnancy visit.
-
Improve on
offering health insurance coverage to low-income women.
-
Have
preconception health objectives in public health programs.
-
Add more
research.
-
Take full
advantage of the public health surveillance.sector.
Nicole Wilson
Best SyndicationBooks on Pregnancy
Keywords and misspellings: priatal prenatal pre-natal helthy
heallthy baby prenatal vitimins suplements recomendations medications not to
take during pregancy birth-defects march-of-dimes
|
RSS Feeds to Pregnancy News
