AP12925

Testing to Detect Premature Births

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), pre-term birth affects 500,000 babies in the United States. Several factors may increase the likelihood of woman having a pre-term birth but cannot pinpoint the exact reason this happens. Researchers from Imperial College London may have a way to detect if a child will be born premature by testing for specific molecules in a pregnant woman's urine. They found that elevated urinary levels of the amino acid lysine were associated with spontaneous premature birth. I have known women that have had a premature baby and after an extensive hospital stay, the baby turned out just fine. That is not to say that the child does will not have health issues as the grow. In some cases, a premature birth can result in the death of the child due to internal organs not fully developed. Hector Keun, lead researcher from the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London states, "While we know that metabolism in the mother changes substantially during pregnancy to help supply the growing fetus with nutrients, we were surprised to see so early in pregnancy a link between metabolites that we could easily detect in a urine sample and low birthweight. Our findings imply that it could be possible to improve the identification of women at higher risk of delivering smaller babies or premature delivery using non-invasive metabolic profiling technology early in pregnancy." Researchers are not quite sure if this simple test can be applied to a wider population and more research is needed before it can be used in practices. "Future investigation of the factors that produce the molecules associated with these pregnancy outcomes should improve our understanding of the genetic and environmental factors that influence restricted fetal growth and thus help us to reduce the likelihood of these events. We will also go on to test if exposure to these metabolites during pregnancy has a lasting impact on child development after birth."(Keun)

References: Imperial College London. "Non-invasive urine test could be used to predict premature birth, delivery of small babies." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 11 July 2014. .


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