The baby before birth
Fetal growth, scans, fetal monitoring and stillbirth.
Care topics 1
-
How a baby grows and changes inside the womb. MedlinePlus says a normal pregnancy lasts nine months, in three-month stages called trimesters, and that the fetus grows and develops in each one...
Conditions 3
-
A baby who is not growing as well as expected inside the womb. The Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine says it can come from many mother, baby and placenta conditions, happens in up to 10% of...
-
Neural tube defects are birth defects of the brain, spine or spinal cord. They start in the first month of pregnancy, often before a woman knows she is pregnant. The two most common are spina bifida...
-
The death of a baby in the womb at or after the 20th week of pregnancy. It can happen before or during delivery. In many cases the cause remains unknown. In a large US study that examined stillbirths...
Fronts 3
-
Pages about ways to see and hear the baby and to keep track of the mother, such as ultrasound, heart-rate monitors and blood pressure checks at home.
-
Pages about steps taken before or during pregnancy to lower the chance of a problem: supplements, food, activity and stopping smoking.
-
Pages about the blood, urine, questionnaire and newborn tests that look for a problem before or soon after it shows. Each page says who is tested and what the test looks for.
Interventions 1
-
A detailed ultrasound scan of the baby's heart before birth. It is a more specialised scan than the routine pregnancy ultrasound. The American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM) publishes a...
Products 2
-
A belt with sensors, worn on the abdomen, that shows the baby's heart rate, the mother's heart rate and contractions. FDA cleared it in 2021 for pregnant women in their 32nd week of gestation (or...
-
A wireless pod and patch of electrodes stuck to the mother's abdomen that shows the baby's heart rate, the mother's heart rate and contractions without belts. FDA cleared the first version in 2014...
Technologies 4
-
A blood test in pregnancy that looks at small pieces of the baby's DNA in the mother's blood to check whether the baby is more likely to have conditions such as Down syndrome. It is a screening test...
-
A recording of the baby's heart rate and the mother's contractions, usually through belts on the abdomen. It is used to spot babies who may be short of oxygen. A Cochrane review found that, compared...
-
A scan that uses sound waves to make pictures, here of the baby inside the womb. MedlinePlus says it is used to monitor the health and development of a fetus, and that a routine scan between weeks 18...
-
A scan of the blood flow in the cord that carries blood to and from the baby. In high-risk pregnancies a Cochrane review linked its use with fewer baby deaths around birth, and with fewer inductions...
Outcomes 2
-
Whether the baby died before birth or soon after birth. It is one of the four parts of the CHAP primary combined outcome, which counts fetal and newborn deaths together.
-
Whether a baby was born smaller than expected for the length of the pregnancy. CHAP used it to check that treating the mother did not slow the baby’s growth.
Publications 1
-
The main report of the AFFIRM trial of a care package for women with reduced fetal movements, published in The Lancet in 2018.
Studies 8
-
A trial in 33 maternity hospitals in the UK and Ireland that tested a package to make pregnant women more aware of the need to report reduced baby movements quickly, and to standardise what staff do...
-
A Dutch trial in women near term whose babies were thought to be growing poorly. Half were offered induction of labour and half were watched closely and left to go into labour on their own. The...
-
A study in eight countries that scanned the babies of healthy, low-risk women about every five weeks from 14 weeks of pregnancy until birth, to draw international charts of how a fetus grows. The...
-
A large study at 35 centres in which pregnant women had both standard first-trimester screening and a cell-free DNA blood test, with the DNA result kept hidden. The DNA test found trisomy 21 more...
-
A US study that followed 2334 healthy women with low-risk pregnancies from four racial and ethnic groups with repeated scans, to see whether fetal growth charts should differ by group. It found that...
-
A US study that gave families who had a stillbirth full examinations, including of the baby and the placenta, to work out why the baby died. A probable cause was found in about six in ten...
-
A European trial in women whose babies had severe growth restriction between 26 and 32 weeks of pregnancy. It tested three plans for deciding when to deliver, based on heart-rate tracing or on blood...
-
A multi-country study, funded in part by the World Health Organization, that followed low-risk pregnancies of women in ten countries with seven scheduled ultrasound scans, to build fetal growth...
Organizations 2
-
A private foundation that funds global health research.
-
A research institute of the US National Institutes of Health that works on child health, pregnancy and development. It is listed as a funder of the NICHD Fetal Growth Studies and the Stillbirth...
Bottlenecks 2
-
Small babies are often not recognised before birth when scans are done only when there is a clinical reason. In one English study of first-time mothers, scans done only for clinical reasons found one...
-
Three major sets of fetal growth charts, one from the United States and two international, give different weights for a typical baby at 39 weeks and so flag different babies as small. There is no...
Ideas 1
-
Ultrasound is the best way to date a pregnancy, but it needs trained sonographers and costly machines. Researchers trained a computer program to estimate how many weeks pregnant a woman is from...