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Shut Up and Sip Your Coffee

Anytime I pick up a cup of coffee in the morning, one of those grandma’s myths about the serious health consequences of coffee crosses my mind. If you’re a pregnant woman, your fears may be several orders of magnitude greater than mine. For many years, coffee was believed to result in low birth weight and pre-term delivery. New findings, however, show that it appears to present no threat.

According to a Danish study, coffee does not have any negative effect on birth weight and does not increase the number of premature births.

The research carried out by a Danish University monitored 1,207 pregnant women all of whom regularly drank coffee during their term. On average they drank three cups a day.

Over the course of the last 20 weeks of pregnancy, half of them continued drinking coffee while the other half were offered a decaffeinated product instead.

The author of the report found no significant difference between the two groups. In the first group, 4.2% of the babies were born prematurely and 4.5% had low birth weight, compared with 5.2% and 4.7% respectively in the other group.

Please note that the Danish Interventioanal Study looked at birth weight and pre-term delivery and therefore does not explain all existing concerns about coffee and pregnancy. If your concern is birth weight or preterm delivery, focus on cigarette and alcohol.

In the meantime, until future studies uncover additional knowledge, just sip your coffee. Remember however, that as with anything, moderation is the watch word.

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Any tingling sensation in legs while pregnant? It may come back, sorry

Restless Legs in Pregnancy Likely to Recur, Researchers Say
Among those who developed syndrome, many had later occurrences, study found

Women who experience restless legs syndrome (RLS) during pregnancy are at increased risk for having it again during future pregnancies or developing a chronic form of the condition later in life, researchers have found.

RLS causes unpleasant sensations in the legs. Symptoms are generally worse at night and tend to progress with age. Movement generally relieves symptoms.

Italian researchers recruited 74 women who had RLS during pregnancy and 133 who did not. Six-and-a-half years later, the women were interviewed about RLS symptoms, additional pregnancies, occurrences of other diseases and medication use.

Of the women who had RLS during pregnancy, 18 (24 percent) also had the disorder at the end of the study, compared to 10 (8 percent) of the women who did not have RLS during pregnancy, the investigators found.

About 60 percent of the women who had RLS during a first pregnancy had the disorder again in a future pregnancy, compared to 3 percent of the women who did not have RLS during a first pregnancy, according to the report published in the Dec. 7 issue of the journal Neurology.

"This is the first long-term study to look at a possible connection between restless legs syndrome in pregnancy and repeat occurrences in later years or future pregnancies," study author Dr. Mauro Manconi, of Vita-Salute University in Milan, said in an American Academy of Neurology news release.

"Most of the time, when a woman experiences RLS in pregnancy, it disappears after the baby is born. However, our results show that having the condition during pregnancy is a significant risk factor for a future chronic form or the short-term form in other pregnancies down the road," Manconi added.

 

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