Women who get pregnant shortly after their first birth giving may put themselves and their next baby at greater risk for adverse events, a new US study finds.

Women who are 35 and older do quite often plan to have closely spaced pregnancies,” Schummers said. “Among younger women, the pregnancy is less often planned if it’s closely spaced. If someone has a baby and six months later they discover they are pregnant, perhaps that’s not intended. We thought because older women more often plan to have their pregnancies closer together they might not have the increased risks that are due to unintended pregnancies”, said to Reuters study leader Laura Schummers, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia.

Conclusions

As it turned out, there were fewer complications among the babies carried by older women, compared to younger women. But there was still a slight increased risk when the spacing between pregnancies was short, the authors reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.

But contrary to what the researchers had expected, short intervals between pregnancies - six versus 18 months - were linked with higher risks for death and serious complications (such as transfusions of three or more units of blood, being put on a ventilator, being transferred to an intensive care unit, or organ failure) for older women, but not younger women.

Read the whole article HERE