Babytalk | Has COVID-19 brought a decline in premature births?

Is it possible something good has come from the COVID pandemic? Coming out of Europe there is some good news. Both Ireland and Denmark have noticed a dramatic decline in babies being born prematurely.

For us in the medical world we count weeks, not months, when determining if a baby is born prematurely. A full term baby would be a baby born 38 to 40 weeks. A baby born at 36 to 37 is called a late preterm baby. A baby born before 36 is considered preterm or premature.

The word premature means born before mature enough to live outside the womb. These babies require help with feeding, breathing, maintaining their temperature, among other challenges. The earlier a baby is born the more challenges they face.

Some of these challenges become challenges the babies have all their lives. The rate of blindness, cerebral palsy, learning disabilities, and other things are more prevalent in the population of those babies born too early. This a huge cost both emotionally and physically to families.

The conundrum of babies being born preterm is something the medical world has spent many years studying. There are things we know that are predictors of when a woman is at risk for delivering her baby early.

Some of the risk factors which cause a woman to have a baby too early are: previous preterm delivery, twins, triplets or other multiples, a short cervix, smoking cigarettes, infections, gingivitis, high blood pressure, diabetes, autoimmune disease, depression, stress, too much amniotic fluid, vaginal bleeding, a young or older mother, a lack of prenatal care.

In Denmark, the number of babies born less than 28 weeks dropped by 90% during the country’s month-long lockdown this past spring. In the Munster region of Ireland, Dr. Roy Philip, a neonatologist at University Maternity Hospital Limerick, was vacationing overseas when the country went into lockdown on March 12. When he returned, he noticed no orders had been written for breast milk fortifiers, which are normally feed to very preterm babies. The staff told him there had been no babies born who needed it.

He thought at first this has to be a mistake. He then looked at the numbers of babies born under 3.3 pounds, very low birth weight, back to 2001. He found eight out of every 1,000 live births in the hospital were born very low birth weight. In 2020, the rate is much lower, at least during this past spring. In fact there were no babies born under 2.2 pounds during a time when a least a few should have been born, statistically.

The team in Ireland decided to study and compare and do research on why this was happening. At the same time, Dr. Michael Christiansen headed up a team to study why the NICUs in Copenhagen were nearly empty. They found the rate of babies born before 28 weeks had dropped by 90 percent.

Is it because women were home and able to rest? Is it because people were diligently washing their hands? Is it because women were staying home and avoiding being exposed to infections?

In this country, Dr. Stephen Patrick a neonatologist at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital in Nashville, also has noted a 20% decline in preterm babies.

Some hospitals have had no change in preterm deliveries.

However, enough hospitals have experienced this drop in preterm deliveries to warrant further exploration. If this trend, supported by confirmed data, is real, this could be a break through on the prevention of very early preterm births.

Now that is some very good news.

Katie Powers, R.N., is a board-certified lactation consultant and perinatal educator at Manatee Memorial Hospital’s Family BirthPlace. Her column appears every other week in Healthy Living in the Bradenton Herald. Contact her at katie.powers@mmhhs.com.