What Causes Miscarriage and Premature Birth - 5 Main Reasons

Unfortunately, there are multiple reasons which can cause miscarriage and premature birth. And yet, intended mothers can prevent most of them.

Experts identify five main reasons that significantly increase miscarriage risk. This post will explain them and show what every pregnant woman can do to improve live birth chances.

What is a Miscarriage?

Miscarriage is an involuntary termination of pregnancy before 22 weeks. Pregnancy stops 22-37 weeks is premature birth. Both cases are tragic for future mothers. However, fortunately, they rarely happen. According to statistics, only 6-8% of women face such a problem. At the same time, in half of the cases, pregnancy is interrupted at 34-37 weeks. Thanks to modern medicine, doctors can save children at this time. So most women don't have to worry about early delivery.

Unfortunately, some women who have one miscarriage have a high risk for repeated pregnancy failure. If this happens to them at least once (no matter for what reason), the risk of repeated premature termination of pregnancy increases from 2.5 to 10 times. In this case, doctors may offer to stay in a hospital for preservation in the early stages of pregnancy, which will be the most reasonable decision.

Anemia

All pregnant women need to make sure they don't have anemia, which often occurs in expectant mothers and affects pregnancy. Anemia is usually treated with iron supplements.

Short Cervix

The most common cause of miscarriage is a short cervix. It was confirmed by several international studies conducted in 2011 and 2013 (more than 8.5 thousand pregnant women participated in the latter). If a woman has such an anatomical feature, natural progesterone, which a doctor should prescribe, will protect against the risk of premature birth.

Genital and Vaginal Infections

A common cause of preterm labor is previous or existing genital and vaginal infections. First of all, it is gonorrhea, chlamydia, and bacterial vaginosis - their presence in history sometimes leads to spontaneous abortions and premature births. True, in the vast majority of cases, termination of pregnancy, for this reason, is possible for up to 24 weeks. If this peak is passed, the transferred infections will no longer affect the course of pregnancy.

A good way to prevent miscarriages for pregnant women with such a problem is a course of ascorbic acid. Thus, recent studies by scientists have shown that ascorbic acid destroys the biofilm of pathogenic microbes in bacterial vaginosis.

It has been proven that folic acid has a good effect on preventing miscarriages (it is also necessary to prevent such an unpleasant fetal malformation as a neural tube defect) and some antibiotics. Another way is taking progesterone in the early stages of pregnancy with the habitual miscarriage.

Thrombophlebitis

Another circumstance that interferes with a happy pregnancy is thrombophlebitis or varicose veins. According to medical observations, women with problematic veins have more miscarriages than those who don't have this condition. In this case, drugs from the group of low molecular weight heparins work well as a prevention method.

Multiples

Twin (and any multiple) pregnancies are another reason that causes miscarriages and premature births. As a rule, twins and triplets are born prematurely, so the risk of preterm birth in such pregnancies increases. As for the prevention methods, there are practically none in this case. The only proven method of preventing miscarriage in a twin pregnancy only works if the expectant mother has a shortened cervix - then drugs from the group of micronized progesterones help her. If a woman does not have such a pathology, prescribing progesterone will make no sense.

Does Staying in Bed Helps to Prevent Miscarriage?

Fertility doctors have issued a special guideline for managing patients with preterm birth. It, among other things, lists the methods that were recommended in such cases to pregnant women before, but, alas, in practice, they turned out to be useless. For example, the observance of bed rest does not save from the problem. In addition, previously, doctors believed that expectant mothers, who have an increased risk of premature termination of pregnancy, are helped by antispasmodics and magnesium - alas, scientific studies have not confirmed the effectiveness of these methods.

What to Do if You Had Multiple Miscarriages? 

Luckily, nowadays, women who can't deliver a baby can become biological mothers and have healthy kids. Fertility clinics all over the world successfully perform IVF programs with surrogate mothers. Surrogacy allows to use oocytes and sperm of the intended biological parents and helps them create happy families. We hope that this article gave you hope and made you one step closer to your healthy baby.