A new study claims that shorter women may have a higher risk of pre-term birth.
According to researcher at the March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center, women who are short in height have shorter pregnancies, smaller babies, and higher risk for a preterm birth.
In the study, researchers at the Ohio Collaborative looked at 3,485 Nordic women and their babies, and found that maternal height, which was determined by genetic factors, helped shape the fetal environment, influencing the length of pregnancy and frequency of prematurity.
In contrast, birth length and birth weight are mainly influenced by transmitted genes.
Worldwide, 15 million babies are born preterm, and more than one million die due to complications of an early birth. Babies who survive an early birth face serious and lifelong health problems, including breathing problems, jaundice, vision loss, cerebral palsy and intellectual delays.
Joe Leigh Simpson, senior vice-president for Research and Global Programs at the March of Dimes said that a woman's height influences gestational length was a major finding by their research networks, adding that the first of what they expected to be many genetic contributions.
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Primary investigator Louis Muglia of the Ohio Collaborative said that their finding showed that a mother's height had a direct impact on how long her pregnancy lasts.
Muglia said that the explanation for why this happened was unclear but could depend not only on unknown genes but also on woman's lifetime of nutrition and her environment. (ANI)
The study is published in the journal PLOS Medicine.