Morning sickness may signal healthier pregnancy
New research confirms that women plagued by morning sickness in early pregnancy are less likely to miscarry. But women who do not experience nausea and vomiting during their first trimester should not be alarmed, Dr Ronna L Chan of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the study's authors, told. "Not all pregnant women who go on to have successful pregnancies experience nausea and vomiting early on or at all. In addition, pregnancy symptoms can vary from one pregnancy to the next, even for the same woman."
From 50 percent to 90 percent of women have morning sickness in early pregnancy, Chan and her team note in the journal Human Reproduction, and previous studies have found that women who have these symptoms are less likely to miscarry.
The women who had no nausea or vomiting during their first trimester were 3.2 times as likely to miscarry as the women who did have morning sickness, Chan and her team found. This relationship was particularly strong for older women; women younger than 25 who had no morning sickness were four times as likely to miscarry compared to their peers who had nausea and vomiting, while miscarriage risk was increased nearly 12-fold for women 35 and older with no morning sickness.
And the longer a woman had these symptoms, the lower her miscarriage risk, the researchers found; this association was especially strong among older women. Women 35 and older who had morning sickness for at least half of their pregnancy were 80 percent less likely to miscarry than women in this age group who didn't have these symptoms.
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