Pregnancy Week by Week

High Risk Pregnancy

You should not be alarmed if you're in this situation, because the term "high-risk pregnancy" by itself does not reflect an immediate danger. It is used only to describe a pregnancy that goes well, but for one reason or another requires a more careful monitoring and more specific analysis. It prevents accidents and injuries and thus reduces the maternal and infant mortality.

80% of pregnant women have no problems. The others show one or more other factors that involve risks regarding the child's life. The risk of premature birth is the most common, but there are others, such as the risk of fetal growth retardation due to illness or lifestyle of the mother before pregnancy and risk of fetal distress at birth.

Risk factors

Maternal age is an important risk factor that should not be neglected: When the mother is very young, less than 18 years of age, she bears a greater risk than an older woman does. The risk of pregnancy toxemia, characterized by hypertension is three times higher, premature birth is doubled, while the perinatal mortality is 2-3 times higher. The risk of having a child with mongolism is also quite high and often the weight of a child born of a mother very young is less than average. These risks are often linked to psychological and social problems, which result in dangerous behavior. Thus, while hiding her teenage pregnancy as much as possible, the mother obviously receives less medical attention than she would need. It should be noted that when a pregnant teenager is accepted by her family and surrounded by affection, you could see a net reduction of complications.
When the mother has more than 38 years, the pregnancy is also considered a high-risk one.
Number of previous pregnancies: Starting with the fourth delivery, the risk of abnormal presentations of difficult childbirth increases because the uterus might have lost its elasticity and thus the ability to contract. There is also the risk of bleeding at birth. The risk of these pregnancies depends very much on the fact that a woman who expects her fourth or fifth child tends to be more careless with the general hygiene precautions of her pregnancy.
Multiple pregnancies: The mother needs to be more carefully supervised when expecting twins. In early pregnancy, the risk of miscarriage is quite high. Later, the issue of premature birth appears, which may indeed occur, especially if there are real twins, when there is an excess of amniotic fluid, or hidramnios, which relaxes the uterus and membranes, causing contractions. In these cases, hospitalization is required. Equally common are the cases of toxemia, hypertension and edema, which also require hospitalization. Twins are often born prematurely and usually one is a little smaller than the other. Therefore, prenatal medical exams and CAT scans are more numerous.
Previous pregnancy problems indicate that the new task should be supervised more closely. Any accident during previous pregnancies, such as: bleeding, fetal growth retardation in the womb, stillbirth and any other problems that occurred at birth, must be reported. They can be caused by improper insertion of the placenta, or difficult or insufficient dilatation of the cervix during birth. You have to take all the measures to ensure that the problems that occurred in the previous pregnancies do not happen again.
Diseases of the mother can cause fetal distress, birth, abortion or premature birth, especially alcoholism, anemia, diabetes, hepatitis, herpes, high blood pressure, Rh incompatibility, urinary infection, listeriosis, measles and AIDS.