Gestational age and fetal height are two most important features for discriminating livebirth from stillbirth. Moreover, hospital, province, delivery main cause, perinatal abnormality, miscarriage number and maternal age are the most important features for classifying stillbirth before and during delivery.
The most common symptom of stillbirth is when you stop feeling your baby moving and kicking. Others include cramps, pain or bleeding from the vagina. Call your health care provider right away or go to the emergency room if you have any of these conditions.
At or after 40 weeks, the risk of stillbirth increases, especially for women 35 or older. Their risk, research shows, is doubled from 39 weeks to 40 and is more than six times as high at 42 weeks.
Stillbirth affects about 1 in 175 births, and each year about 21,000 babies are stillborn in the United States. That is about the same as the number of babies that die during the first year of life.
Stillbirth in Australia
In Australia, 6 babies are stillborn each day, affecting more than 2,000 Australian families each year.
being over 35 years of age. smoking, drinking alcohol or misusing drugs while pregnant. being obese – having a body mass index above 30. having a pre-existing physical health condition, such as epilepsy.
The risk of stillbirth at term increases with gestational age from 2.1 per 10,000 ongoing pregnancies at 37 weeks of gestation up to 10.8 per 10,000 ongoing pregnancies at 42 weeks of gestation.
In more than 1 of every 10 stillbirths, the fetus had a genetic or structural birth defect that probably or possibly caused the death. Infection. In more than 1 of every 10 stillbirths, the death was likely caused either by an infection in the fetus or in the placenta, or by a serious infection in the mother.
Often there aren't any noticeable symptoms or signs before a stillbirth. But there are some things that you should look out for during your pregnancy.
Research has shown that in the third trimester (after 28 weeks of pregnancy) going to sleep on your back increases your risk of stillbirth. As the link has now been shown in four separate research trials, our advice is to go to sleep on your side in the third trimester because it is safer for your baby.
When should I be concerned about changes in fetal movement? To be safe, call your doctor right away if you don't count 10 kicks in two hours (or in the normal amount of time it takes to count 10 of your baby's movements).
There's no way yet to prevent nuchal cords or unwind them from a baby's neck in the womb. But when a baby is born with a nuchal cord, your doctor will know what to do because it happens so frequently. The colored sections of the ultrasound show that the umbilical cord is under the baby's chin.
Maternal stress has also been shown to have a significant association with increased fetal motor activity at 24, 30, and 36 weeks gestation [28].
What causes a stillbirth? There can be a number of reasons why a baby is stillborn however sometimes a cause cannot be found. In Australia, the major causes of stillbirth are infection, the health of the mother, bleeding, a premature labour that cannot be stopped or an abnormality with the developing baby.
About half of all stillbirths happen after 28 weeks of pregnancy; many remain unexplained. Rates are even worse in low-income countries, but the U.S. stillbirth rate is higher than that of many other Western countries.
Most babies (91%) in Australia are born at term (37–41 weeks). This is similar across the states and territories and has been stable over time.
Unemployed mothers were similarly more likely to have stillborn babies (2.85x higher risk - 6.12% vs 1.32%). High levels of perceived stress were shown to double the risk of stillbirth (3.57% vs 1.17%) independent of other social factors and pregnancy complications that can put pressure on mothers.
This includes lots of iron-rich foods as the baby absorbs large amounts of iron from the maternal blood. Consuming nutrient-rich calories and iron rich foods will help to sustain a healthy placenta and prevent conditions such as iron-deficiency anaemia.
Some of these symptoms as outlined by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) include lack of fetal movement, low maternal blood pressure, and falling or erratic fetal heart rate.
Around 21 to 24 weeks, you may start to feel some jerky movements inside your belly. You might even see them on the outside. Repeated jerky movements usually mean that your baby has the hiccups. Hiccups are perfectly normal.