This is a bit of a bummer for the gestating coffee fiends out there.
“Women who are pregnant and consume caffeine, even as little as one cup of coffee a day, are at a higher risk of delivering an underweight baby.”
“There are also more serious complications that can arise with caffeine such as the caffeine can cause the blood vessels to constrict, and it may reduce the blood flow to the placenta, and since it is so easily crosses the placenta and reaches your baby (who then very slowly metabolizes it), caffeine may directly affect his developing cells. It has also been show that pregnant women who drink eight or more cups of coffee a day double the risk of having a stillbirth or miscarriage.”
Read full article…
I cut my habit back to one cup per day during my pregnancies (this was quite a feat at the time). My girls didn’t have an issue with low birth weight - one was just over 9 pounds, and one was just under.
I did a major cleanse this year and pretty much kicked the habit completely now - I’ve switched to herbal tea instead. Of course, now I drink even more of it, so the actual caffeine intake probably equals out!
November 25th, 2008 - 6:04 am
I would love to see the actual research study and abstract on this! Anyone have it? I wonder if they controlled for INDUCTIONS, and if these were all hospital birth clients? I wonder if the results would then be statistically significant? As a homebirth midwife with a very small yearly practice, I have not found this to be true. Most women in our practice and other hb practices have no more than one cup a day (at least what they report) and we tend to have babies on average in the 8.5–9.5 lb range.
Interesting!
November 25th, 2008 - 11:49 pm
Ask and you shall receive!
Here is a link to the full abstract (the study was just published in the British Medical Journal on 11.3.08):
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/nov03_2/a2332
Quote from the abstract:
Pregnancy outcomes
We obtained information on antenatal pregnancy complications and delivery details (gestational age at delivery, birth weight, and sex of the baby) from the electronic maternity databases.
No control for inductions, and they were all hospital births. This abstract is only for the UK study, though the original article alludes to US stats as well.
November 17th, 2009 - 7:34 am
Whether she plans on keeping the baby or not, her doctor should be included