ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, STEREOHYPE
The only tools that clinicians have to predict when a baby will be born are ultrasound and the date of the mother’s last menstrual period, which pin the expected arrival to a five-week window. Even more immediate clues, such as the length of the cervix or how dilated it is, aren’t always good labor predictors. It’s even more difficult to nail down the timing of a preterm birth.
In a study published this week (May 5) in Science Translational Medicine, researchers used samples from 63 individuals in the final 100 days of pregnancy to narrow the prediction window to as short as two weeks.
“Preterm labor is the number one cause of child mortality under the age of five in the world,” says Brice Gaudillière, an anesthesiologist at Stanford University Medical Center and a coauthor of the paper. His group is part of the Stanford Prematurity ...
