Baby and Pregnancy

When you’re pregnant lots of things we take for granted normally suddenly come into question and bring up worries about whether they’re safe or not. One such issue that can cause a lot of worry is vaccinations, especially if you need one or more due to a forthcoming holiday. So what’s the verdict on vaccinations during pregnancy?

Having vaccinations whilst you’re pregnant is a bit of a tricky issue. Most safety tests of vaccinations have been carried out on animals, as they can’t be given to pregnant women during trials in case harm does come to their babies. In general, so-called ‘inactivated’ vaccines are regarded as being safer for pregnant women than ‘live’ vaccines, but the type of vaccine used varies considerably from country to country.

According to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, there are some vaccines that can be used in pregnancy, if you have to visit an area that has a high risk of disease. These vaccines are:

• Hepatitis A
• Hepatitis B
• Polio (injection)
• Typhoid (injection)
• Tetanus
• Diphtheria
• Measles
• Rabies
• Japanese encephalitis

However, the general consensus is that, in order to remain completely safe, it’s best to avoid having vaccinations at all if you can whilst you’re pregnant. This doesn’t mean not being vaccinated if you’re going to exotic climes, as no vaccinations may put you at a greater risk than having them, but avoiding foreign travel that requires vaccinations unless it’s extremely urgent.If you need to travel abroad, for work, to visit family or another key reason, then it’s important to discuss your individual circumstances with a doctor or special travel consultant. Some vaccinations, for example, may be considered unsafe during the first trimester, but may become more viable as your pregnancy progresses.

RCOG say there are some vaccines, which are usually live, that aren’t safe for pregnant women. These are:

• Polio (oral)
• Typhoid (oral)
• Yellow Fever
• MMR

These vaccines can affect unborn babies in various ways, but in general they increase the risk of a baby being born with deformities and affect health and growth.

What to Do?

If you’re going on holiday abroad and have some say in where you go, then it’s advisable to try and choose somewhere that doesn’t require vaccinations. You can always go to exotic places another time, when you’re not pregnant, and don’t have to worry about the issues with jabs. The Department of Health produces a handy booklet that offers a guide to the vaccinations needed for each country, and this could help your decision making process.

If you’re not yet pregnant, but are planning to be or are trying to conceive, then it’s a good idea to have all your routine vaccinations, such as tetanus, up-to-date. In the case of rubella, this is particularly important, as it can be very dangerous for the baby if caught during pregnancy. If you’ve recently had holiday vaccinations, then some experts suggest you wait at least four weeks before trying to conceive. ]]> http://321yourpregnant.info/are-vaccinations-safe-when-pregnant/feed 0 http://321yourpregnant.info/organics-for-baby-beyond-food http://321yourpregnant.info/organics-for-baby-beyond-food#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:01:59 +0000 admin http://321yourpregnant.info/organics-for-baby-beyond-food Did you know that growing cotton uses more pesticides than any other cash crop? Most parents understand the importance of organic food for babies, yet there are also compelling reasons to consider organic cotton bedding and clothing. Get smart facts and more from Lynda Fassa, author, expert on raising kids naturally and founder of Green Babies organic clothing.

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To increase chances of getting pregnant it can be as simple as fully understanding the woman’s menstrual cycle and ovulation period and planning intercourse accordingly. The basal temperature method is often solely recommended by doctors for finding a woman’s fertile time, however basal temperature rises are not an indication of fertility, rather that ovulation has already occurred. A more accurate (and timely) indication of the fertile window is the presence of an egg white-like wet cervical fluid.

The cervical fluid that is wet comes in conjunction with ovulation, so every day it is present couples should have intercourse (provided the man has a normal sperm count) they should only stop when the basal temperature of the woman rises. If there is a case of low sperm count, then it is important that intercourse is staggered to every second day of the wet cervical fluid and stopping as soon as a rise in temperature is noted.

This study tells us that very young, obese children already have more inflammation than children who are not obese, and that’s very concerning”

More than a quarter of children in Britain are overweight  

Obese children as young as three years old show signs of future heart disease, say US researchers.

A study of 16,000 children and teenagers showed the most obese had signs of an inflammatory marker which can predict future heart disease.

In all, 40% of obese three-to-five-year olds had raised levels of C-reactive protein compared with 17% of healthy weight children, Pediatrics reported.

But more work is needed to prove the link with heart disease in later life.

The study, carried out by a team at the University of North Carolina (UNC), looked at children aged one to 17.

Overall, nearly 70% were a healthy weight, 15% were overweight, 11% were obese and 3.5% were very obese.

In the older age groups, the proportion of those in the very obese category with high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) increased even further.

By age 15-17, 83% of the very obese had increased CRP compared with 18% of the healthy weight children.

Inflammation

CRP is found in the blood, and high levels are a sign of inflammation in the body.

Because the damage seen in heart disease is caused by inflammation in artery walls, CRP can be used as a general marker for the risk of heart disease.

In adults, studies have linked high levels with a future risk of heart attacks.

The researchers also looked at two other markers of inflammation in obese children and found levels were higher in one from the age of six and the other from the age of nine.

Study leader Dr Asheley Cockrell Skinner, an assistant professor of paediatrics at the UNC School of Medicine, said the findings were a surprise.

“We’re seeing a relationship between weight status and elevated inflammatory markers much earlier than we expected.”

Co-author Dr Eliana Perrin added: “In this study we were unable to tease apart whether the inflammation or the obesity came first, but one theory is that obesity leads to inflammation which then leads to heart and vessel disease later on.

“A lot more work needs to be done before we figure out the full implication of these findings.

“But this study tells us that very young, obese children already have more inflammation than children who are not obese, and that’s very concerning.”

Judy O’Sullivan, a cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said it was an interesting finding but whether inflammatory markers in children were related to an increased risk of heart disease later in life needed further research.

“Nevertheless, this study reinforces the importance of ensuring children maintain a healthy weight right from the start, to keep them healthy throughout their lives.

“Children should be encouraged to adopt a healthy lifestyle and as part of this, regular physical activity and a balanced diet should be viewed as vital components.”

Parents who are active during pregnancy and early in their child’s life tend to raise more active children.

Some risk factors for adult diseases are associated with lower levels of physical activity in children. Associations have also been reported between early life factors (from birth to around five years) and childhood obesity.

But little is known about the early life influences on children’s physical activity.

So researchers identified children aged 11 to 12 who were taking part in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). Each child was asked to wear an accelerometer for seven days, which recorded minute by minute the intensity and frequency of physical activity.

Valid data, defined as at least three days of at least 10 hours per day, were collected from 5,451 children and were analysed against various factors hypothesised to affect physical activity.

Several factors showed a modest association with later physical activity. These included mother’s activity during pregnancy (specifically brisk walking and swimming), season of birth, one or both parents’ physical activity when the child was aged 21 months, and having an older sibling.

The authors explain that the link with mother’s activity during pregnancy is unlikely to be due to biological factors inside the womb. Instead, mothers who are physically active during pregnancy are likely to keep active after pregnancy, and that this in turn influences children’s physical activity.

The association with season of birth is difficult to explain, they add, but it may be linked to school starting age.

Smoking in the mother and her partner were both positively associated with physical activity. This is surprising, say the authors, because maternal smoking during pregnancy is associated with childhood obesity, but they suggest it may be a result of the social patterning of smoking behaviour.

Few of the pre-school exposures (2-5 years) were associated with later physical activity. There was a small association with TV viewing at 38 and 54 months, but this was modest.

We have shown that early life factors have limited influence on later physical activity in 11 to 12 year olds, but that children are slightly more active if their parents are active early in the child’s life, say the authors.

Helping parents to increase their physical activity therefore may promote children’s activity.

They recommend that future research should re-examine these associations in later adolescence when physical activity declines, particularly in girls.

Efforts to prevent childhood obesity should begin far earlier than currently thought — perhaps even before birth — especially for minority children, according to a new study that tracked 1,826 women from pregnancy through their children’s first five years of life.

Most obesity prevention programs — including the national initiative recently launched by First Lady Michelle Obama — target kids age 8 and older. Scientists at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute’s Department of Population Medicine, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, now say that factors that place children at higher risk for obesity begin at infancy, and in some cases, during pregnancy. Their research also suggests that risk factors such as poor feeding practices, insufficient sleep and televisions in bedrooms are more prevalent among minority children than white children.

“This early life period — prenatal, infancy, to age 5-is a key period for childhood obesity prevention, especially for minority children,” says Elsie Taveras, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School, as well as the director of the One Step Ahead Program at Children’s Hospital Boston. “Almost every single risk factor in that period before age 2, including in the prenatal period, was disproportionately higher among minority children.”

For the study, which appears online March 1 in the journalPediatrics, researchers interviewed 1,343 white, 355 black and 128 Hispanic pregnant women at the end of the first and second trimesters, in the first few days following delivery, and when the children were 6 months and 3 years of age. The women also completed questionnaires when the children were 1, 2 and 4 years old.

When compared to Caucasian women, the researchers found that minority women were more likely to be overweight when they became pregnant and Hispanic women had a higher rate of gestational diabetes, both risk factors for childhood obesity. Although the prevalence of two other risk factors — smoking and depression — during pregnancy was higher among African-American and Hispanic women, those rates dropped considerably when the researchers adjusted for socioeconomic status, suggesting that at least those two risk factors may be impacted by income and education levels.

When researchers looked at other risk factors during children’s first five years, they found that African-American and Hispanic infants are more likely than their Caucasian counterparts to be born small, gain excess weight after birth, begin eating solid foods before 4 months of age and sleep less. During their preschool years, the study suggests, minority children eat more fast food, drink more sugar-sweetened beverages and are more likely to have televisions in their rooms than Caucasian children.

One commonly held theory is that the presence of these and other risk factors is caused by limited access to health care, poverty and low educational levels. However, when Taveras and her colleagues adjusted for socioeconomic status, they found that the prevalence of many of the risk factors remained the same.

More likely, Taveras says, the risk factors stem from behaviors and habits passed from generation to generation or that may be culturally embedded. “For a lot of patients I see in my clinic, it’s intergenerational — for example, the grandmother in the home is influencing how her daughter feeds her own child.” That’s especially true when it comes to at what age mothers begin giving their infants solid food or when the mothers decide to stop breastfeeding, Taveras says.

“Sometimes trying to tackle those intergenerational influences can be very difficult, but actually, it’s promising that some of the areas where we did find disparities are modifiable,” Taveras notes. “Anyone who works with families of young children, including pediatricians and child care providers, can work on these issues.”

The far more difficult task would be to address problems that are related to socioeconomic status. In this study, that didn’t play as large a role because participants had access to good prenatal and pediatric care for their children and were well-educated.

“We found these striking disparities even in this population, where we had racial and ethnic minority families who were of relatively higher education and income,” she says. “Imagine what the disparity would be in a population that’s of lower socioeconomic status.”

That’s a question Taveras plans to tackle next. The goal now is to look at other novel risk factors that might be more common among minority populations — including those that will likely be tied to income and education.

“All of the risk factors that we examined in this study were known factors that have been published in the literature, including some of our own literatures,” Taveras says. “But there are risk factors that are still understudied, that we have a sense are more common, and that’s where we plan to go next.”

This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

(when you read the following please remember that these can be remedied with natural medicines and much more often than not, surgery and infertility drugs are not required)

• Thyroid gland problems are often at the root of a disrupted menstrual cycle and a reduced ability to conceive. (And often undiagnosed by doctors)

• Pelvic adhesions are scar tissue that bind organs in the body after appendicitis, pelvic infection, or abdominal or pelvic surgery which can reduce the ability of the fallopian tubes and ovaries to function

• Hormonal imbalance and irregularity can disturb a woman’s cycle, making it difficult to determine the ‘fertile window‘ of ovulation

• Endometriosis occurs when the tissue that makes the lining of the uterus is located outside the uterus on the fallopian tubes, bowel, bladder or ovaries. The symptoms can be very heavy period, diarrhea and/or painful bowel movements, painful cramps during menstruation, pain during sexual intercourse and chronic pelvic pain. Studies show that between 30 to 40% of women with endometriosis are infertile. If a woman has a mild case of the dis-ease she may not have pregnancy compromises. Some cases show that endometriosis is due to;

1. Scar tissue, in some cases it can cause rigid webs of scar tissue between the uterus, ovaries and fallopian tubes which could mean the egg may not transfer to the fallopian tube. If a woman has significant scar tissue this is what can impair fertility.
2. Ovarian cysts, also known as endometriomas, which may indicate an advanced case of endometriosis.

• Sexually transmitted diseases if left untreated, some of them can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) (so can using IUD’s for that matter). Blocked fallopian tubes, miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy and scarring are other complications that can arise from STD’s. All causing complications with fertility. The STDs chlamydia and gonorrhea are the most important preventable causes of infertility

• Early menopause - Women are defined as going through early menopause by the depletion of ovarian follicles and the fact that they have stopped menstruating before 35. The causes, although medically often unknown, may include radiation or chemotherapy, autoimmune disease or smoking.  (Cancer, particularly gynecological cancers can also impair fertility)

• Being obese or overweight can lead to infertility. Being mostly sedentary can have many adverse effects on the body, and one is certainly disrupted ovulation and reduced fertility

• DES - During the 1930’s to the 1970’s women that had problems miscarrying were often prescribed DES (Diethylstilbestrol), a synthetic estrogen which supplemented natural estrogen production. Women of mothers who took this drug, known as DES daughters, have a higher risk of gynecological problems, one of which includes infertility.  (Drugs are way too often administered to the public before sufficient studies have been preformed- this case is not the first and unfortunately will not be the last. Please consider these past events as well as the known side effects before diving into IVF and other infertility treatments- it’s not just our own health we can effect)

• Multiple miscarriages - These can lower the odds of pregnancy

• Blocked fallopian tubes or damage - About 20% of infertility cases are the result of damage to the fallopian tube. The symptoms include; an unusual vaginal discharge, bleeding, fever, pelvic pain

• Women with PCOS (Polycystic ovarian syndrome) may have difficulty producing a mature egg because of the large amounts of male hormones like testosterone that is produced. When these hormonal androgens reach excessive levels in the body then the ovarian follicles may stop developing to maturity

• Uterine fibroids – These are noncancerous tumors of the uterine wall. The fallopian tubes may become blocked by them and can also effect the lining of the uterus possibly preventing implantation of the egg

• Smoking – Infertility can be a result of smoking habits in either parent. Aside from the damage it can do to an unborn baby, smoking reduces sperm motility and number in males, and can damage a woman’s ovaries

• Amenorrhea - Any dis-eases associated with delayed puberty or absence of menstruation, which include sickle cell disease,  HIV and AIDS, kidney disease or diabetes and Cushing’s dis-ease can cause problems with conceiving. Eating disorders bulimia and anorexia potentially can lead to period irregularities that can cause infertility also

If you are looking for something that can treat these symptoms and can help you fall pregnant within 2 to 4 months making your body healthy at the same time, take a look at what the image below can offer you. I wish you true success and a happy and very healthy pregnancy!

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Children from urban areas whose mothers suffer from depression during pregnancy are more likely than others to show antisocial behavior, including violent behavior, later in life. Furthermore, women who are aggressive and disruptive in their own teen years are more likely to become depressed in pregnancy, so that the moms’ history predicts their own children’s antisocial behavior.

That’s the conclusion of a new longitudinal study conducted by researchers at Cardiff University, King’s College London, and the University of Bristol. The research appears in the January/February 2010 issue of the journal Child Development.

The study considered the role of mothers’ depression during pregnancy by looking at 120 British youth from inner-city areas. “Much attention has been given to the effects of postnatal depression on young infants,” notes Dale F. Hay, professor of psychology at Cardiff University in Wales, who worked on the study, “but depression during pregnancy may also affect the unborn child.” The youths’ mothers were interviewed while they were pregnant, after they gave birth, and when their children were 4, 11, and 16 years old.

The study found that mothers who became depressed when pregnant were four times as likely to have children who were violent at 16. This was true for both boys and girls. The mothers’ depression, in turn, was predicted by their own aggressive and disruptive behavior as teens.

The link between depression in pregnancy and the children’s violence couldn’t be explained by other factors in the families’ environments, such as social class, ethnicity, or family structure; the mothers’ age, education, marital status, or IQ; or depression at other times in the children’s lives.

“Although it’s not yet clear exactly how depression in pregnancy might set infants on a pathway toward increased antisocial behavior, our findings suggest that women with a history of conduct problems who become depressed in pregnancy may be in special need of support,” according to Hay.

Via NYT

Up to a quarter of all women suffer from depression during pregnancy, and many are reluctant to take antidepressants. Now a new study suggests that acupuncture may provide some relief during pregnancy, even though it has not been found to be an effective treatment against depression in general.

The Stanford University study recruited 150 depressed women who were 12 to 30 weeks pregnant, and randomly assigned 52 to receive acupuncture specifically designed for depressive symptoms, 49 to regular acupuncture and 49 to Swedish massage.

Each woman received 12 sessions of 25 minutes each; those given acupuncture did not know which type they were getting. (In the depression-specific treatment, needles are inserted at body points that are said to correspond to symptoms like anxiety, withdrawal and apathy.)

After eight weeks, almost two-thirds of the women who had depression-specific acupuncture experienced a reduction in at least 50 percent of their symptoms, compared with just under half of the women treated with either massage or regular acupuncture.

There was no significant difference in the rates of complete remission — about a third in each group. The findings appear in the March issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

The lead author, Rachel Manber, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, said the results suggested that some symptoms of depression during pregnancy might be related to physical discomfort that is alleviated by acupuncture.

Still, the results were striking, she said, adding, “It’s quite remarkable, especially since the prevalence of depression is highest in the third trimester of pregnancy, so it goes against the course of how you would expect depression to go.”