Article
ISLAMABAD, June 26 (Online): Australian researchers believe they have found a trigger of type 1 diabetes in children – their mothers eating potatoes and other tuberous vegetables during pregnancy.
New research has shown that vegetables such as beetroot, potatoes, carrots, turnips and parsnips can be infected with a bacterial toxin that researchers believe unmasks the disease in children who already have a genetic predisposition.
A team from the International Diabetes Institute and Melbourne’s Monash University found that mice with a genetic predisposition to type 1 diabetes were more likely to have a damaged pancreas, and develop diabetes, if their mothers were given the toxin bafilomycin during pregnancy. They believe the same is true in humans, giving a 30 per cent higher risk of the disease.
The team’s findings will be presented at the American Diabetes Association Congress in the United States this week.
More than 100,000 Australians have type 1 diabetes, which requires regular insulin injections and blood sugar tests, and has a number of potential complications, including kidney damage, blindness, amputations, heart attack and stroke.
The director of the International Diabetes Institute, Paul Zimmet, said that type 1 diabetes had a strong genetic component, but “you do not get type 1 diabetes just by having the genes . . . you need to have an environmental trigger”.
Professor Zimmet said it was likely that the toxin found in the infected vegetables made its way to the foetus and then altered the cells in the pancreas, creating an increased risk of diabetes.
The most common stages for diabetes to be diagnosed in children are five to seven years of age, and then at puberty.
At this stage, he said, the findings had implications only for prevention of the disease, but the team was working on a treatment.
Pregnant women with a strong history of type 1 diabetes in the family should peel their vegetables – particularly potatoes – carefully, Professor Zimmet said. They should also take care to remove any “scabs” from the vegetable, as most of the infection was in the skin.
The risk of the virus was greater in utero than for a child eating the vegetables, he said, because the foetus did not have a developed immune system.
But other diabetes experts reacted cautiously to the news. Fergus Cameron of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute said it was unlikely there was a single environmental factor that caused type 1 diabetes.
In identical twins, for example, who are likely to be raised on the same diet and in the same environment, the concordance rate for diabetes was only 50 per cent, Dr Cameron said.
An endocrinologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Alison Nankervis, said the research was interesting, and warranted further investigation. But she said the theory remained unproven, and there was much doctors did not know about what happened in the uterus.
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Posted in Pregnancy Nutrition | Leave a Comment »
Article
June 26, 2007
Pregnancy is not only most creative and fulfilling phase of womanhood but it teaches you to be more responsible and caring towards yourself particularly with respect to pregnancy diet and nutrition. In the pregnancy period, your baby, whom you are creating with your flesh and blood, is still very much part of your body and for that you need more nutrition intake. During pregnancy, nutritional needs are increased, both to support the rapid growing fetus and to supplement the needs of your changing body structure.
Plan your pregnancy diet in such a way that you are the only supply line for your unborn baby’s nutrition needs. Your eating habits will decide your baby’s health and well-being. Poor eating or rather unhealthy food habits can adversely affect your pregnancy diet and nutrition and result in conditions like anemia, pre-eclampsia, mood swings, fatigue, leg cramps, constipation, etc.
Pregnancy: Celebrate It With Healthy Pregnancy Diet
During pregnancy, every bite counts. Whatever an expectant mother eats or hates to eat, affects her child. According to a recent research, besides physical development, intelligence of a child and his/her mental faculty depends a lot on the diet and nutrition of the mother during pregnancy.
In the first trimester of pregnancy, one does not need extra calories per se in pregnancy diet. However, one needs to have lots of high protein, calcium, vitamins such as Vitamins B12, B6, vitamin D iron, zinc and folic acid (it has been proved after myriad researches that even a simple tablet of folic acid prevents severe neurological- brain and spinal cord disorders). In addition, minerals, essential fatty acids and substantial calories are all-important for the fetus’ all-round development and therefore should be essential components of pregnancy diet and nutrition plan.
As the pregnancy period progresses, one must start eating more of proteins in the pregnancy diet. A pregnant woman needs approximately 300 calories more than normal during last 6 months of pregnancy. In first three months of pregnancy, your weight gain should be 3-5 pounds in per month but in last 6 months, you should not gain more than 3 pounds per month. Your pregnancy diet and nutrition chart should be designed in accordance with these acceptable weight gain goals.
Foods To Include In Pregnancy Diet
You should include fresh, light, wholesome, high fiber foods in your pregnancy diet in form of porridge (minerals and natural fiber); dairy (calcium); red vegetables like carrot and tomatoes (carotene); red and orange fruits like apples and oranges (vitamin B complex). Walnuts, almonds and raisins (vitamin and minerals); leafy vegetables like cabbage, spinach, broccoli (calcium and iron); brown rice, jaggery, lotus stem (iron); sprouts, lentil and pulses (protein), curd, buttermilk, paneer and of course plenty of milk (calcium) are important ingredients of pregnancy diet.
During the pregnancy period, eat five small meals a day instead of three heavy meals. Also, reduce your intake of fat, sugar and salt. Do not indulge in overeating during pregnancy because if you eat too much you will feel uncomfortable.
One basic mantra of staying healthy is to drink lots of water (will prevent dehydration and wash out the toxins of body) as soon as you wake up in the morning and after your afternoon nap It helps clean your digestive system too. You might be scared you would vomit if you drink more water, when you have nausea, which is normal in pregnancy, but the fact is, water helps to flush out the toxins from your body.
During pregnancy, strictly avoid junk food because they just give you empty calories (and extra pounds) without the nutritional benefits of healthier foods also avoid caffeine and alcohol fats, oily food, additives and unpasteurized food.
Besides healthy eating and maintaining a healthy pregnancy diet and nutrition plan in consultation with your doctor, you should do yoga and other light exercises under expert medical advice. Last but not the least, try to remain stress free, meditate and in this period of your pregnancy increase your connectivity with the Almighty. This will definitely shower you and your baby with positive energy.
So, be cool, relax, and celebrate your pregnancy and be a responsible and caring mom-to-be with balanced pregnancy diet and nutrition.
Pregnancy diet is the most important factor to take care when you are pregnant. Pregnancy diet and nutrition is important because not only it keeps you healthy and fit during pregnancy but it also provides vital nutrition to your baby who is dependant on you during the pregnancy period. Visit Pregnancy Planning for more information regarding pregnancy diet and other issues related to pregnancy.
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Posted in First Trimester Pregnancy, Pregnancy Health, Pregnancy Information, Pregnancy Nutrition | 6 Comments »
Burying the unborn
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
May 26, 2007 at 2:24 AM EDT
On the afternoon of Feb. 3, 25 people gathered in the chapel of Smiths Funeral Home in Sarnia, Ont., to honour the passing of Angel Lynzey Burden.
The community sent flowers and cards of condolence. Angel’s ashes sat on a table up front, in a decorative urn half the size of a coffee cup.
It was a teary farewell, considering no one actually had known the deceased, so Pastor Jay Black could not offer the comfort of memories to be cherished. Instead, he described a future that would never be – no baby showers, no first birthday, no need for the newly bought bassinette, no frilly dresses.
Dresses, because, at the time of the service, everyone assumed Angel had been a girl. At seven centimetres in size and a mere 20 grams, not even the pathologist could be sure.
Memorial cards with hand a foot imprints for two miscarried children. (Charla Jones/The Globe and Mail)
It was only days later, after the funeral and the wake held with sandwich trays and crudités at the Burden home, did lab results reveal that Angel was actually a 13-week-old male fetus, who, after he was miscarried, fit easily in the palm of his mother’s hand.
“I tried to look, but there was nothing to indicate he was a boy,” said his mother, Tina Burden, who is glad she and her husband, Allan, picked a unisex name. “But … even at 13 weeks he had fingers, he had long feet, a mouth, ears, eyes, toes. To me, he was my baby and shouldn’t be tossed aside like he was nothing.”
A few weeks earlier, an ultrasound had told the Burdens that they had lost the pregnancy. After that, on Jan. 25, Ms. Burden, 35, suddenly began to deliver while she and her daughters, 11 and 2, were visiting the children’s grandmother. At the hospital, nurses told her about the hospital’s group-burial service for early-pregnancy losses. But Ms. Burden said no: “I wanted my own personal funeral, to grieve my child in my own way.”
It’s a sentiment shared by an increasing number of would-be parents. Miscarriages end roughly 15 per cent of pregnancies for women in their 20s and as many as one in four for women over 35. Most happen at home, behind a bathroom door, and couples grieve privately. Hospitals traditionally treat the “early products of conception” as medical waste, bundling them in biohazard bags to off-site incinerators. Under vital-statistics laws in most provinces, any pregnancy that ends before 20 weeks is a non-event – no birth or death certificate, medical investigation or formal burial necessary.
Yet across Canada and in other parts of the Western world, the modern miscarriage has birthed a new and potentially incendiary brand of perinatal bereavement.
A growing number of women and their advocates, many of them staunchly pro-choice, are pushing for the formal recognition of the miscarried fetus as a symbol of their grief and loss. In some cases, they’re seeking out these rites even when, for medical reasons, they have chosen to terminate the pregnancy.
But the fetal funeral could be a Pandora’s Box. Some graveyards and funeral-home staff have been reluctant to bury remains for which no burial permit can be issued. Medical staff worry it may push patients to dwell on losses they would rather forget. More profoundly, holding funerals for fetuses raises implicit, uncomfortable questions about when life begins.
Those who oppose abortion have long fought for the respectful burial of human fetuses in acknowledgment of their personhood. Can society simultaneously agree to mourn the early fetus and still sanction its destruction? Could the desire to recognize formally the death of a fetus – which has no legal status as a life – reignite the abortion debate?
“This trend of ritualizing grief … will be watched with enthusiasm and pleasure by those who want to restrict women’s reproductive choices, and watched with concern by those interested in preserving women’s reproductive liberty,” predicted Arthur Schafer, director of Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba.
“Anything that encourages us to view early-stage pregnancy as personhood could impact the law on the choice to terminate pregnancy and on embryonic stem-cell research.”
Indeed, the Campaign Life Coalition, the political wing of Canada’s anti-abortion movement, considers the trend a sign of “society’s progression.” Jim Hughes, Campaign Life’s national president, recently attended two funerals for fetuses miscarried before 20 weeks. He applauds the trend, regardless of whether those involved consider themselves pro-choice. “This is their little shot at recognizing this was a human being that was a part of their family.”
The people supporting fetal funerals – some of whom are lobbying government officials to help make the rites more readily available – feel their efforts should have no impact whatsoever on the legal status of life before birth. (Tina Burden, for example, says that she is generally pro-choice.) They say that being pro-choice should include allowing women to choose how they view the potential life growing within them and how to treat its loss.
“It is not a mourning of the entity, per se, but the emotional investment already made in the idea of that child and planning for that potential life and the future,” said Lise Ferguson, executive director of Perinatal Bereavement Services Ontario (PBSO), a non-profit charity that has taken a lead role in educating health and funeral staff on the issue.
She says the trend is a reflection of the contemporary realities of pregnancy, in which science has given prospective parents new windows through which to view their developing children.
A similar trend has emerged in the U.S., combined with efforts to have certificates of birth, not just death, issued for stillborn babies. In February, the Royal College of Nurses in Britain issued a revised position paper calling for the sensitive disposal of all human fetal remains regardless of their gestational age. Municipal officials in Lombardy, Italy, have reportedly passed a new law that will allow the burial of a fetus at any age.
Maureen Colford, a Toronto woman who has suffered several miscarriages and become a champion of the cause, wants society to get over its political squeamishness.
“Funerals are for the living,” said Ms. Colford, who even raised the issue with front-running candidates at last fall’s Liberal leadership convention. “Yes, it touches on the political question of when life begins, but women deserve to be treated with kindness. … If I want to think of it as a baby, name my baby and have a burial, I should be able to do that.”
For Tina Burden, it was Marilyn Lau, the Bluewater Health hospital’s manager of chaplain and pastor services, who reassured her with that option. Relatives were there when the nurses brought Angel to the room, in a little box, wrapped in soft gauze and a knitted blanket. “It was so comforting to know … that they would be caring enough to do this,” Ms. Burden said.
The Burdens decided on a cremation, although funeral-home staff warned that he was so small there might be no ashes to collect. In the end, they received a modest sprinkling in the tiny urn that now sits on their living-room wall unit.
Ms. Burden can’t bring herself to bury Angel. “Say if I move to Nova Scotia or something and I can’t see him any more?” she said.
Law is silentThe health system and funeral industry have responded in earnest, organizing the cremation and burial of fetal remains hardly bigger than dragonflies. They’re tweaking definitions of medical waste, taking plaster casts of fetal footprints, snapping pictures as keepsakes and setting out immature bodies in jewellery boxes and seashells for viewing. Several cemeteries have dedicated special plots for fetuses lost in early pregnancy.
In the past four years, perinatal grief counsellors have trained nurses, hospital staff and more than 1,000 funeral home directors in Ontario alone.
“It went from not being on the radar to being an issue,” said Joseph Richer, registrar of the Board of Funeral Services of Ontario, the industry’s licensing body. “There’s definitely an increase in the number of people who want to celebrate the life of a baby who didn’t survive past that 20-week gestation.”
It never used to be this way. Back when James Cardinal started in the bereavement business 25 years ago, not even stillbirths prompted traditional funerals.
“Twenty years ago, you never saw the mother,” said Mr. Cardinal, owner of Cardinal Funeral Homes in the Toronto area. “The father or the uncle would come in, they didn’t want any fuss made. … It was quick and quiet, like a backroom deal.”
But over the past decade, the deal has changed dramatically. In part, he says, it’s because funeral directors have become more interactive with families in asking questions and offering options.
Joanne Bunton, a community-outreach co-ordinator for Jerrett Funeral Homes, part of the Dignity Memorial Service Providers chain, recalls that she began to see these couples some time in the late 1990s. One in particular stands out. The couple came to her when she was apprenticing as a funeral director, cradling the body of their stillborn baby, which they had retrieved from the depths of a hospital pathology department.
“Isn’t there something you could do for us?” they pleaded.
Ms. Bunton made a plaster cast of the infant’s footprints. Soon, word spread that she was the person to see for a keepsake after a miscarriage.
“People just started coming to me,” said Ms. Bunton, who still spends her spare time crafting tiny caskets and urns on her kitchen counter.
She eventually joined the board of PBSO, which started in 1993 to support people who lose pregnancies or infants. In the past four years, PBSO, which counsels about 800 couples a year for free, has invested particular effort in the issue.
“After a miscarriage, people often say their friends or family even don’t understand why they can’t just ‘get over it,’ or that, never mind, they can have another child,” she said. At PBSO, the mantra is “a loss is a loss, regardless of gestational age or circumstances.”
Since most provinces do not recognize the fetus as a person until after 20 weeks gestation or 500 grams in weight, Ms. Ferguson said, hospitals and funeral officials often feel that they are not supposed to treat pregnancy losses before 20 weeks as deaths.
“But the legislation doesn’t say you can’t do this or that with a baby under that age – the law is silent on this issue,” Ms. Ferguson said.
Typically, the prospective parents never see what happens to the fetus. When Valerie Diren-Lear lost her pregnancy at 19 weeks on Christmas Day, 2001, she was able to hold “a fully formed little girl” in her arms. She and her husband, Peter, were so devastated that when the nurses said they would take care of everything, she thought, “Yes, that’s what I want – someone else to take care of everything,” she said.
“You don’t think that means, ‘We are going to burn your baby along with the trash.’ ”
But a few weeks later she learned the remains of the daughter she named Sophie Rose were incinerated with general hospital refuse, “with gallbladders and amputated toes, or whatever … and the ashes were sent somewhere up in Northern Ontario. I felt awfully guilty. … I let them do this thing to my baby.”
A PBSO volunteer, Ms. Diren-Lear often describes her experience to hospital staff in the hopes others will be spared the same fate. But more than that, she wants a standardized policy that would set out in writing the burial or disposal options open to women who miscarry in every Ontario health-care facility.
“But it’s a difficult topic,” she acknowledged. “We met with our MPP and he didn’t want to touch it because it was too close to the abortion topic.
“I’m not religious,” she stressed. “But I think it should be up to the parents to decide what to do with the life they started. … Even at two weeks, it’s not ‘nothing.’ It’s all your hopes and dreams.”
Boon for funeral homes
Hospital chaplain Marilyn Lau suspects society has been slow to recognize the sorrow of early miscarriages in part because the psychology of grief is barely out of its infancy. “Death and dying are not well taught in medical school,” she said. “Not until the last 20 years has the literature on grief appeared.”
In 2001, Ms. Lau’s predecessor, Elaine Walker, inspired by stories like Ms. Diren-Lear’s, introduced one of Canada’s most elaborate policies on handling hospital miscarriages at Bluewater Health, which encompasses three community hospitals in Sarnia and Petrolia, Ont.
Bluewater now offers women who’ve miscarried three options in writing, in co-operation with two local funeral homes and the Resurrection Cemetery, where a special group plot has been designated for the remains of pre-20 week losses.
They can have the hospital arrange the burial, take care of funeral arrangements themselves or take the traditional option of having the pathology department discard the remains (which doctors insisted remain an alternative).
When patients elect to have the hospital arrange burial, Bluewater transports the fetal remains to the cemetery once a month and, twice a year, the hospital holds a graveside memorial service. Sometimes, Ms. Lau said, couples who suffered miscarriages 20 or more years ago have turned up, saying they’re grateful to have a place to remember their loss.
Most hospital delivery wards now have programs in place to handle the issue sensitively. But patient advocates still have problems outside of obstetrics departments.
“Sometimes the loss happens in the emergency department or in day surgery … and there are big gaps in awareness,” Ms. Ferguson said. “The very nature of emergency departments is … to get people through as quickly as possible.”
While sensitizing medical staff remains an ongoing challenge, winning over the funeral industry has been considerably simpler: “There is no shame to say that this is a market the funeral industry can tap into,” Ms. Ferguson said.
“This is potentially a great business for them, with increasing numbers.”
In fact, when PBSO first contacted the Board of Funeral Services of Ontario three years ago, Mr. Richer, the registrar, was surprised to hear the issue might pose a problem. “If anyone wants to celebrate a life, no matter how old, they can,” he said. “You don’t even need a body.”
Besides, Mr. Richer readily agreed, “This is an opportunity for business – why would they say no?”
Cardinal Funeral Homes, for example, now supplies kits to five Toronto-area hospitals that include a brochure with burial options for couples who miscarry.
Even in the town of Brandon, Man., population 45,000, funeral director Brent Buchanan said he has seen the popularity of funerals for fetuses grow in the past three or four years.
Mr. Buchanan, a 25-year veteran of the industry, along with another funeral-home operator and the Regional Health Authority have made a deal to handle the “products of conception” up to 20 weeks. Families can arrange their own funerals or be part of a group service the hospital holds twice a year, in which all the fetuses are cremated together and buried in a plot provided by the City of Brandon cemetery department, followed by a hospital luncheon for the 40 or so people who attend.
“We’re trying to meet a need that’s never been met,” Mr. Buchanan said. “I think it’s a realization that this product means something and in the past it was just regarded as a piece of flesh, and there’s a realization that it’s not a piece of flesh – it’s a child to a parent, as soon as conception takes place.”
‘Don’t look’
For five years, Manuela Held and her husband tried to have a baby. They underwent rounds of fertility treatments and Ms. Held, a 40-year-old marketing executive in Vancouver, detailed their struggle on a popular blog that at its peak received 3,000 hits a day.
Then, quite unexpectedly last October, she and her husband conceived naturally. They were ecstatic, but cautious. She had miscarried four times before and so, with a Doppler ultrasound device at home, they listened to their baby’s heartbeat everyday. They nicknamed the child “Shoelet,” in honour of Ms. Held’s self-described footwear fixation.
But 18 weeks in, they learned their daughter had Down syndrome and a heart problem, and while they waited for the amniocentesis results, she died.
“We were absolutely completely devastated. At five months, we were invested in this child. We had been going out and getting things. We had started fixing up the nursery and buying clothing.”
The staff at BC Women’s Hospital asked if she wanted to see the remains after the delivery. At first, determined to cling to the idyllic vision of her child, Ms. Held didn’t even want a glimpse: “I kept saying to my husband, ‘Don’t look at her, don’t look at her.’”
The staff asked if they could help make funeral arrangements and Ms. Held asked only that she “not be treated as medical refuse.”
“I’m actually pro-choice,” Ms. Held stressed, “but regardless of what the law might say, or what any religion might say, and I’m not religious at all, this was a baby to us. In our heart and soul, it was a baby.”
Sixteen hours later, they left the hospital, but made it only two blocks before Ms. Held “was hit by absolute panic. … I felt sick, having left without seeing her, without holding her…”
They turned back. “We met at the hospital chapel, not because we’re religious, but because it was a quiet, respectful place.”
The staff brought them “Shoelet” – whom they named Georgia Rose – in a “teeny, tiny basket. She had on a little nightie and a bonnet and a flannel blanket.” Instinctively, Ms. Held found herself reaching down to loosen the ribbon of her bonnet beneath her chin, worried it might somehow be uncomfortable.
“We sat and talked to her and sobbed and told her that we loved her and how our lives would never be the same without her. …
“As horribly painful as it was, we cherish those memories,” Ms. Held said as she wept, “because for that brief, brief period of time we were a family, and we had a chance to show that we loved her.”
In the end, Ms. Held felt compelled to hold a funeral. They cremated Georgia Rose and placed her ashes in a small urn her husband made from a hunk of curly maple driftwood he had found the weekend he had proposed to Ms. Held. They kept the ashes at home in Squamish until this month, when the snow melted and they could hike up a nearby mountain and bury her on the peak they can see from their house.
Ms. Held rejects the idea that the advent of fetus funerals could compromise the pro-choice movement: “How is this still not a matter of personal choice? If I call this a baby, you call this a baby. If I call it a fetus, you take your cues from the person who has suffered the loss. We have to separate legalese from human emotion and decisions.”
Investigate miscarriagesMs. Lau observed that if a couple sees the fetal remains of their child, they are much more likely to want a funeral, “or any ritual” that might be helpful.
Only a few decades ago, society tended to see science as infallible, and “rituals were seen as archaic,” said Walter Podilchak, a University of Toronto sociologist. But with the growing sense that scientific reason cannot give meaning to many life experiences, and in the absence of religion, personalized rituals have gained increasing prominence. If pregnancy became medicalized in the 20th century, Prof. Podilchak said, the fetus funeral might be “like home births, an attempt to take back the rituals of birth.”
Critics often view such trends as narcissistic. Mothers and couples holding a funeral after a miscarriage “risk being seen as decadent for investing so much in themselves and their suffering.” But public rituals create support networks “through which we can get through some really horrific episodes in our lives.”
But pregnancy and birth always have been events surrounded in ceremony, religious or otherwise – a baby shower, a baptism, a bris, a dad handing out cigars. And technology has brought its own rites of passage to the event, fostering a form of prenatal bonding never before possible — home hormone tests that tell you when you’re ripe to conceive, the positive home-pregnancy test saved as a souvenir and that first shadowy picture of Junior posted on the refrigerator door, taken in utero by ultrasound.
“Technology has definitely played a role,” said Prof. Schafer, the University of Manitoba ethicist. “Psychologically we feel a more intense attachment because you can see it and you see it as your baby as opposed to a mass of fetal tissue.”
The emergence of the fetal funeral also mirrors the shift in the modern demographics of childbirth. The number of women having their first child over the age of 30 has jumped nearly 50 per cent in a decade, according to 2004 numbers from Statistics Canada. And for women over 40, the miscarriage rate can climb higher than 50 per cent. The national birth rate, meanwhile, hovers below 1.5 children.
As Mr. Richer sees it, fetal funerals are a generational phenomenon. When a mother who might have 10 children or more miscarried, no one spoke of it. “Whereas today, the family units are smaller,” he said, “The mother may be 38 years old and the clock is ticking, and they’re saying we want a child … and that child becomes more precious.”
For Maureen Colford, the lack of scientific understanding behind the causes of miscarriage only heightens her sense of loss. She believes the public recognition of an early loss is necessary not just for emotional reasons, but for medical ones.
On a grey March afternoon, she was on her knees hunched over the cemetery plot where she has buried three miscarried babies, digging furiously to reveal the gravestone hidden beneath the snow. The Colfords bought the plot at Toronto’s historic Necropolis Cemetery in 1998 to bury Matthew, lost at 21 weeks. No one objected to his internment. But in 2003, when they tried to bury Miranda, lost at 12 weeks, the funeral home balked.
Ms. Colford and her husband Gregory, a lawyer, had to push the issue. The city clerk eventually intervened to confirm that the burial of a pre-20-week fetus was permissible with a pathologist’s letter stating the remains were human. In 2005, she was able to bury Georgia, lost at 16 weeks.
Ms. Colford, 38, has two living sons, aged 10 and 7, but in all she has lost five pregnancies. After Miranda, she wanted an explanation. But her miscarriages prompted no medical investigation, nor any official registering of the event.
Each miscarriage, she says, should be treated as a serious medical problem worth investigating. “Why don’t we count them?” she asked. “We should be tracking every pregnancy and its outcome. It’s important to track them because we need to know why babies are lost. Maybe then there would be fewer miscarriages. … Maybe we would find out about environmental causes.”
Ms. Colford eventually sent Miranda’s remains and placenta to a New York pathologist she had discovered online who specializes in post-miscarriage investigations. For $275 (U.S.), she learned she suffered from a clotting disorder that compromises her own health as well as her placenta, a condition for which she now takes an Aspirin daily.
“No one here could have told me that, because they didn’t ask,” she said, because such investigations are not done as a matter of course. “But in my case, finding out could save my life.”
Last fall, as a delegate at the Liberal leadership convention, she pitched her position to three of the front-running candidates. They all listened, she said, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion in particular, with whom she spent an hour on the phone one Sunday morning.
“They all sounded terribly sympathetic, and showed such kindness that I sincerely believe they will help,” she said. “But it’s very hard for a politician to commit to anything … especially on such a polarizing issue. Abortion is the third rail in politics – no one wants to touch it.”
Isn’t she concerned at all that her actions might inflame the abortion debate? “Aren’t we so past that?” she said.
Memorializing abortion
Perceptions of pregnancy, Prof. Schafer pointed out, are particularly prone to shifting: “Basically, when the pregnancy is wanted, it’s a baby; but when it is unwanted, it’s fetal tissue.
“We’re complex creatures,” he said. “We manage to simultaneously occupy contradictory positions.”
This is especially true when pregnancies are terminated by choice. According to the Canadian Perinatal Surveillance System, the rate of stillbirths in the country dropped nearly 40 per cent from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s largely because of elective, medical terminations.
“Fanatics in any subject will obviously pick things and exploit it,” Ms. Ferguson said. “But I don’t see a conflict at all between having a termination and grieving the attachment you had to that baby.”
One Toronto woman in her late 30s agreed to share the story of her decision on condition of anonymity, fearing those who would sit in judgment.
It was her first child and she had pictured having the perfect, natural, midwifery birth. She even planned to forgo the standard ultrasound. But then she spent so many days lying on the cool tile of the bathroom floor praying for the vomiting and nausea to end that her midwife sent her to a hospital clinic at 18 weeks. It changed everything.
Her unborn son was diagnosed as having a fatal chromosomal disorder known as Trisomy 18. “He had hydrocephalus, which had crushed his developing brain. He had major problems with his digestive system, and he couldn’t move very well,” she said.
Experts gave a bleak prognosis. She and her husband spent that night on the phone, “calling people, friends, doctors, anyone we could find to explain this to us, to help us figure out how to save our child.
“We had multiple university degrees between us and assumed that, of course, everything was fixable, right? There were no problems on earth that couldn’t be repaired in this high-tech day and age?”
But slowly it sank in. They learned their baby, a boy, also had a major heart malformation. He was terminally ill. He would die either in her womb or shortly after birth.
“It was made very clear to us that while the hospital would support whatever choice we made, the end result would always be the same,” she said. “So we made the decision to terminate the pregnancy. Or rather I did.
“It is unkind to force a woman to carry a baby that’s dying.”
After taking a drug to trigger a spontaneous abortion, she delivered with hardly the need to push, since he was so small.
“He was tiny and perfect-looking on the outside – unfortunately not so okay on the inside. If I hadn’t seen the ultrasound close-ups with the problems, I might not have believed it myself,” she said. “We took dozens of pictures, and the nurse helped us make handprints and footprints. We baptized him, and after about six or seven hours, I finally handed him over to the nurse, for weighing and measuring.”
They held a funeral at their church a few days later, cremated him and buried him in a local cemetery. They invited family and friends and shared food a small restaurant nearby. “Then we went home, without a baby, and tried to figure out what to do next,” she said.
“Some decisions we make are done out of love and kindness, no matter what the world thinks.”
Embryo funerals?
As the fetal funeral makes its way to becoming an established rite of the 21st century, advocates in the field also predict the rise of ceremonies to mark pregnancy losses even before a woman is actually pregnant.
Ms. Ferguson said PBSO anticipates women and couples will soon be commemorating the loss of unused embryos created at fertility clinics: “An embryo in dry ice for four or five years can be as much as a baby as a newborn is to parents,” she said. “It’s not weird or bizarre to feel that grief.”
This, Ms. Ferguson knows from personal experience. Since joining PBSO in 2001, she has suffered 11 early pregnancy losses with embryos created through assisted reproductive technology, some after just a few hours. She did manage to carry twin girls to 26 weeks. One lived a few hours, the other six months.
“People can wonder how you can be concerned about embryos after only two hours,” she said. But Ms. Ferguson had planned a career change, and started a college fund for her unborn children when they were mere cells in a dish.
Even when parents choose to discard the embryos, she said, “because they feel they have had all their children, or the couple splits up and practically it makes no sense,” it is still a loss like any other.
“Our technology is advancing faster than our ethical and moral abilities to deal with all the implications,” Ms. Ferguson said. “We can make these little babies. We need to be aware of what it means to be able to do that and what to do when we lose them.”
Carolyn Abraham is The Globe and Mail’s medical reporter.
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Article by Associated Press. LONDON – A new test dubbed “Pink or Blue” promises to tell parents the sex of their fetus just six weeks into pregnancy, but critics question its reliability and say it could pose an array of ethical issues.
The British company DNA Worldwide launched the test last month for sale over the Internet targeting a broad world audience. A U.S. company has been selling the test online, mainly to Americans, since last year.
The test works by analyzing fetal DNA that leaks into the mother’s bloodstream. Some experts expressed doubts about the technique.
“The earlier in pregnancy that you do these tests, the less fetal DNA there will be around, and possibly, the less accurate the test will be,” said Dr. Patrick O’Brien, a consultant obstetrician and spokesperson for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
“At six weeks of pregnancy, it’s questionable whether the technology is that good.”
Parents willing to wait longer can get a head-to-toe ultrasound at 20 weeks that is almost 100 percent accurate. Invasive procedures like an amniocentesis — which carry a small risk of miscarriage — can be done at about 11 weeks.
Test not regulated
Parents who order the Pink or Blue test receive a packet where the mother provides a spot of blood on a special card. That is sent back to the company’s laboratories, and within four to six days, the gender of the fetus is revealed with up to 98 percent accuracy if instructions are properly followed, according to DNA Worldwide.
Because the test is marketed as “informational” rather than medical, it is not regulated by health authorities in Britain or abroad.“We’re trying to bridge the gap between science and the consumer,” said David Nicholson, director of DNA Worldwide. “Many parents are very keen to know if it’s a boy or a girl, and we are about providing that information.”
The test works by detecting fetal DNA that can naturally be found in the mother’s blood. It looks for the male-specific Y chromosome. If the Y chromosome is detected, the fetus is a boy. If not, it’s a girl.
The Pink or Blue test is based on a method developed by Italian researchers, who published their research in the journal Human Genetics in 2005. They claimed the Y-chromosome could be reliably identified in the mother’s bloodstream as early as six weeks into pregnancy.
DNA Worldwide offers customers a money-back guarantee if their results prove to be wrong. Of the hundreds of tests sold since the test went on sale in April, Nicholson says they have only had to refund one customer.
Even if DNA Worldwide’s test is accurate, experts recommend that parents get professional advice.
“Someone who takes this test should talk to their physician if they’re going to do anything with that information besides buying baby clothes or painting the nursery,” said Dr. Rachel Masch, an obstetrician/gynecologist at New York University School of Medicine.
“And even in that case, they might have to make a lot of returns.”
Other experts worried about ethical implications if parents use the information to select the gender of their babies, by getting an abortion if the test indicates the “wrong” sex.
“Sex-selection might encourage parents to view their kids as commodities,” said Marcy Darnovsky, associate executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a U.S.-based public interest group. “Tests like this could normalize genetic selection and lead to a scenario where parents are one day picking out their child’s characteristics from a catalogue,” Darnovsky said.
Still, doctors said the technology behind the test could one day allow advanced genetic screening, like testing for chromosomal disorders such as Down Syndrome.
“If we had a safe and accurate genetic test to look at fetal DNA, that would be the holy grail,” said O’Brien.
© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
The company does not ship to countries including China and India, where there is sometimes a marked preference for boys over girls. Some experts suggested the test could lead some parents to abort if they were unhappy with the result.
Posted in Early Pregnancy Week By Week, Early Sign Of Pregnancy, First Sign Of Pregnancy, First Trimester Pregnancy, Pregnancy, Pregnancy Information | Leave a Comment »
| Nutrition dos and don’ts during pregnancy Doctor’s visit |
| with Dr Jacqueline E Campbell Sunday, April 01, 2007 |
MANY pregnant women become concerned about what they should and shouldn’t be eating. That is understandable as a healthy diet contributes to a successful pregnancy by reducing complications and promoting adequate foetal growth and development. Nutrition is thus an essential component of prenatal care.
A well-balanced diet contributes to normal birth weight for the baby, improved foetal brain development, decreased chance of pregnancy complications such as morning sickness, fatigue, mood swings, anaemia and pre-eclampsia (life-threatening condition that often occurs in the 3rd trimester – symptoms include high blood pressure, protein in urine, edema, blurred vision, pain around the liver) and a speedy recovery after delivery.
Weight gain
Weight gain is desirable for all women since it is essential for normal foetal growth. It is important not to restrict calories during this time. Generally a pregnant woman should aim to keep her weight gain around 20 to 30 pounds. The recommended increase in weight gain does not give a green light for mothers-to-be to overeat as excessive calorie intake will lead to excess weight gain – a situation that must be avoided. Although extra nutrients are required, an increase of only 300 calories per day is recommended.
What to eat
Even before pregnancy begins, nutrition is a primary factor in the health of mother and baby. A well-balanced diet before conception contributes to a healthy pregnancy and will probably need few changes when pregnancy occurs. The basis of a well-balanced diet is a balance of grains, fruits and vegetables, protein, dairy and fats. A balanced diet should be built around the five big nutrients of pregnancy – calcium, complex carbohydrates, good fats, iron and protein.
According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, pregnant women should increase their usual servings of a variety of foods to include a total of four or more servings of fruits and vegetables, four or more servings of whole-grain or enriched bread and cereal, four or more servings of milk and milk products, and three or more servings of protein – meat, poultry, fish, eggs, nuts, and dried beans and peas.
Grain products are the main source of complex carbohydrates. Complex carbohydrates provide energy, prevents constipation and nausea, and gives essential nutrients including fibre, folate, Vitamin B and protein. They can be obtained by eating whole grains such as whole-wheat bread, cereals, brown rice or pasta. Refined grain products such as white bread and white rice, biscuits and cakes should be avoided as these are of little nutrient value.
Fruits and vegetables will provide essential vitamins and minerals as well as fibre to aid digestion and prevent constipation. Vitamin A derived from green leafy vegetables and yellow fruits is important for the development of the baby’s bones, skin, hair and eyes. Vitamin C is important for bone growth and tissue repair.
Protein is composed of amino acids, the building blocks of human cells which are crucial for a developing foetus. It is also important in protecting against the development of pre-eclampsia later in pregnancy. Protein foods are also normally iron-rich foods, important to keep the blood well-oxygenated.
Dairy: Getting enough calcium can help prevent a new mother from losing her own bone density as the foetus uses the mineral for bone growth.
Calcium is also needed for the development of teeth, muscle, heart, nerves and blood.
Fat: Some fats are necessary for the baby’s development, but these should be limited to manage weight gain during pregnancy. An occasional sweet treat is fine, but should not be included as a daily part of the diet. Essential fats are found in polyunsaturated oils such as sunflower and soya bean oils, and monounsaturated oils such as olive and canola oils.
Water and fluids: The body’s need for fluids will increase as the pregnancy progresses. An adequate fluid intake will help in the prevention of early labour, stretch marks, and constipation. Caffeine-containing beverages such as coffee, tea and colas should be limited to only one cup per day.
What not to eat
In addition to foods a pregnant woman should consume, there are also foods that should be avoided. One of the big concerns for pregnant women is the risk of eating harmful bacteria – listeria and salmonella – which can lead to miscarriage, early labour and toxemia.
Listeria
The bacteria Listeria monocytogenes is often present in certain foods, and in low levels may have no effect on healthy people and often goes unnoticed. However, if ingested by a pregnant woman, it can lead to miscarriage, stillbirth or early labour. Foods at higher risk of containing listeria include cold foods that will not be reheated, including pate, deli meats like ham and salami, and pre-mixed salads; soft serve ice cream; soft cheeses, such as brie, ricotta; smoked seafood and any leftovers kept in the fridge for more than 12 hours.
Salmonella
This is a form of food poisoning that can trigger miscarriage or premature birth, and is most often traced to undercooked poultry and meats, and raw eggs. Other foods to avoid include raw meat and seafood, including sushi, sashimi and hot dogs.
Toxoplasmosis
Undercooked meat can be contaminated with a parasite that causes toxoplasmosis. If a pregnant woman becomes infected, the infection can be transferred to the foetus – potentially resulting in a miscarriage.
Other food considerations
Fish: Pregnant women, nursing mothers, and women of childbearing age who may become pregnant should be aware of the hazards of eating certain kinds of fish, specifically shark, swordfish, king mackerel, and tilefish, because these fish may contain high levels of methyl mercury which may harm an unborn baby’s developing nervous system.
Nuts: If there is a family history of food allergies, it is best to avoid eating peanuts or products containing peanuts. Peanut allergy is a serious health concern that is on the increase. Exposure to peanuts during pregnancy and through breastfeeding can increase the chance of the allergy developing if the baby has a predisposition.
Vitamin A: Although vitamin A is essential during pregnancy, supplements and foods particularly high in Vitamin A are not recommended, because of the risk of birth defects.
Alcohol: No safe level of alcohol has been established for pregnant women. Because of this, abstinence is the safest choice. The issue of drinking alcohol during pregnancy is somewhat controversial. Some practitioners believe that an occasional dilute drink, or a small glass of beer or wine once or twice a week is harmless. Others feel that current research indicates even as few as one to two drinks per week may cause harm to the foetus by increasing risk of prematurity or low birth weight. Excessive intake is definitely associated with a condition called Foetal Alcohol Syndrome, which can cause permanent mental retardation and congenital deformities.
Intake of alcohol should be avoided even while trying to conceive.
Cigarette smoking
Cigarette smoking during pregnancy is associated with low maternal weight gain and low birth weight of the baby. Children of mothers who smoke are also at greater risk for certain diseases and may have learning problems.
What about supplements?
Although taking supplements will not replace eating a nutritionally potent array of foods, supplement will ensure that the right balance of nutrients is taken. In fact, women who are only thinking about getting pregnant should begin taking prenatal supplements. Also as soon pregnancy is confirmed, a prenatal vitamin should be taken. Supplementation during pregnancy is very important.
Research has shown that supplementing with 400 mcg of folic acid every day beginning 12 weeks before conception guards against neural tube defects. Other important supplements are:
. Calcium – 1,500mg per day
. Omega 3 fatty acids – 1,000mg per day
. Choline 450 to 1000 mg per day
. Vitamin D 400 IU per day
Supplementation with anti-oxidants is also important as pregnant women with pre-eclampsia have abnormal anti-oxidant defences and supplementing with Vitamin C and E daily, in addition to taking a prenatal vitamin, may help reduce the chances of pre-eclampsia in high-risk women. Although further research is needed, studies have shown that women with pre-eclampsia have higher levels of homocysteine and lower levels of folic acid.
Supplementing with extra folic acid can help keep homocysteine levels within normal range. In addition to preventing neural tube defects, good dietary choices may prevent certain diseases such as acute lymphoblastic leukemia, liver disease, diabetes and pre-eclampsia. Dr Jacqueline E Campbell is a family physician in private practice.
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/lifestyle/html/20070331T180000-0500_121160_OBS_NUTRITION_DOS_AND_DON_TS_DURING_PREGNANCY_.asp
Posted By Sally Aubrey
Posted in Pregnancy Nutrition | 1 Comment »
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – High levels of vitamin D, obtained through the diet or through supplements, during pregnancy appear to reduce the risk of recurrent wheeze or wheeze symptoms in early childhood, according to the findings of two studies reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. In the first study, Dr. Carlos A. Camargo, from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and colleagues used a food questionnaire to assess vitamin D levels during pregnancy and then correlated these findings with recurrent wheeze in the child at 3 years of age. A total of 1,194 mother-child pairs were included in the analysis.
The average total vitamin D level during pregnancy was 548 IU per day. Recurrent wheeze was identified in 186 children, the report indicates.
Mothers in the top 25 percent of vitamin D were 61-percent less likely to have a child with recurrent wheeze compared with those in the lowest 25 percent.
For each 100-IU increase in vitamin D, the risk of having a child with recurrent wheeze fell by 19 percent.
This benefit was noted whether the vitamin D came from supplements or the diet.
If others duplicate these findings, the researchers suggest that randomized trials of vitamin D repletion in populations at high-risk of asthma and asthma mortality be performed.
In the second study, Dr. Augusto A. Litonjua, from the Channing Laboratory in Boston, and colleagues examined the impact of maternal vitamin D intake on childhood wheezing symptoms at 5 years of age. This study involved 1212 mother-child pairs.
Compared with the group with the lowest vitamin D levels, women with the highest levels of vitamin D had a 52-percent reduced risk of wheeze and a 65-percent reduced risk of wheeze in the previous year. Vitamin D levels were also associated with reductions in bronchodilator response, which is aggravated in asthma.
“Our results are of great public health significance because they could lead to relatively low cost interventions of vitamin D supplementation that would have a large effect on the future prevalence of asthma in children,” the researchers conclude.
Posted By Sally Aubrey
SOURCE: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, March 2007.
Posted in Pregnancy, Pregnancy Health, Pregnancy Information, Pregnancy Nutrition | Leave a Comment »
ISLAMABAD: Acupuncture is effective at relieving pelvic pain during pregnancy, a study says.
Pelvic girdle pain is common among pregnant women with one in three affected suffering severe pain.
Researchers found acupuncture was better at easing the pain than standard and specialised exercising.
The team from Gothenburg’s Institute for the Health of Women and Children said the medical profession should be more open to using acupuncture.
Report co-author Helen Elden, a midwife at the institute, said according to BBC report: “The study shows that methods other than structured physiotherapy may be effective in treating pelvic girdle pain in pregnancy and that acupuncture represents an effective alternative.”
It [acupuncture] is good because it does not involve any drugs, which women have to be careful about taking during pregnancy And she added: “A combination of several methods is probably even better.”
The team studied the effect of three six-week treatment programmes on 386 pregnant women suffering from pelvic girdle pain, which it is thought is caused by hormones affecting ligaments and muscles.
One group were given a standard home exercise routine, a second received the exercise routine and acupuncture, while the third had a specialised exercise regime aimed at improving mobility and strength.
Pain levels were recorded every morning and evening and assessments were done by an independent examiner.
The women using acupuncture experienced the best results, followed by those who underwent the specialised exercise programme.
Daniel Maxwell, a member of the British Acupuncture Council, the regulatory body for acupuncturists, said the benefits of acupuncture for pregnant women was well known.
The use of acupuncture to treat pain during pregnancy certainly seems credible
While Dr Graham Archard vice-chair, Royal College of GPs said: “Many pregnant women turn to acupuncture to relieve pain, especially pelvic pain.”
“It is good because it does not involve any drugs, which women have to be careful about taking during pregnancy.”
But he said the medical profession needed to be more consistent in recommending acupuncture as a treatment.
“Some GPs and midwives do refer people on for acupuncture, but some don’t. It really does vary from area to area.”
Dr Graham Archard, vice-chair of the Royal College of GPs, said 60% of family doctors use alternative therapies.
“The use of acupuncture to treat pain during pregnancy certainly seems credible.
“Pregnant women should be avoiding drugs so acupuncture, which releases the bodies natural painkillers, should be of benefit.”
And Sue Macdonald, of the Royal College of Midwives, said: “Women should be offered acupuncture for this type of pain, but we must remember it might not be for everyone.”
Posted by Sally Aubrey.
http://www.onlinenews.com.pk
Posted in Pregnancy Health, Pregnancy Information, Pregnancy Symptom | 1 Comment »
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — Brain abnormalities may be the cause of sudden infant death syndrome — the number one cause of death in infants between 1 month and 1 year of life.
Sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, is the unexpected death of an infant whose death remains unexplained after all attempts, including an autopsy, have been made to find a cause. Researchers now believe this mystery has a concrete biological basis.
In a typical situation, the mother or father puts their apparently healthy baby down for a nap or for the night and returns to find the baby dead. Since the medical community cannot tell the parents why their baby died, they often blame themselves or each other. This often results in even greater tragedy, according to the American SIDS Institute.
Putting infants to sleep on their stomachs is a well-identified risk factor. Sixty-five percent of the SIDS infants evaluated in this study were found sleeping on their stomach or side during the time of death. Now, researchers have documented abnormalities in the brain stem of babies who have died from SIDS.
Doctors from Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School examined brain autopsy specimens from 31 infants who died from SIDS and 10 who died from other causes. After examining the lowest part of the brainstem — the medulla oblongata — they found abnormalities in nerve cells that make and use seratonin.
The brainstem seratonin system is thought to help coordinate breathing, blood pressure, sensitivity to carbon dioxide, and temperature. When babies sleep face down, it is believed they breathe in exhaled carbon monoxide; taking in less oxygen. The rise in carbon dioxide activates nerve cells in the brainstem so the baby doesn’t asphyxiate.
But researchers believe that babies who die from SIDS have defects in their seratonin system, which impairs their reflex to wake up and turn over.
Defects that been identified are:
- Deficiencies in a seratonin receptor called 5HT1A
- An abnormally high number of neurons that make and release serotonin
- Insufficient amounts of a seratonin transporter protein
This new data may explain why SIDS occurs twice as often in males then females — male SIDS infants have fewer 5HT1A receptors than females SIDS infants.
Researchers hope to develop a diagnostic test to identify infants at risk for SIDS. They also hope to develop a drug or treatment to protect infants who have abnormalities in their brainstem seratonin system.
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
SOURCE: The Journal of the American Medical Association, 2006;296:2124-2132
Posted By Sally Aubrey
Posted in Pregnancy, Pregnancy Health, Pregnancy Information | 1 Comment »
