When pregnant women are happy, their babies are happy too.
The officials from the World Health Organization have recently updated the health care guidelines concerning pregnant women. Therefore, women are strongly recommended to visit their doctors around 32 times during pregnancy, although 16 visits are the average number.
According to the experts, pregnant women, who take care of themselves more, have a much lower risk of stillbirth. In other words, the number of perinatal deaths will significantly drop off if women go more often to their health providers.
On the other hand, fewer visits lead to an elevated risk of complications during pregnancy, including the death of the mother and the baby. Based on the estimates, around 303,300 pregnant women died last year due to pregnancy-related problems, and roughly 2.7 million newborns died in the first four weeks after birth due to health issues mothers had.
It is worth mentioning that 2.6 million of these children were stillborn. Such numbers point to the fact that pregnant women must understand that their health comes first. WHO experts underline that most of these deaths which occur every year can be prevented with the help of standard medications and without the use high-tech devices.
It means that every woman can afford as much as 30 visits to their health care providers during pregnancy. Public health officials established that just 64 percent of the 303,300 pregnant women who died visited their doctors at least four times.
This is the reason why WHO decided to update the health guidelines and raise awareness among all pregnant women across the United States. According to Anthony Costello, maternal health chief at WHO, the new recommendations aim to introduce preventive measures and reduce the risks of complications. This way, women will prevent the development of life-threatening conditions such as diabetes and cancer.
“My opinion is all gestational diabetes is undiagnosed Type 2 diabetes,” says Dr. Lois Jovanovic, a medicine clinical professor and endocrinologist at the Keck School of Medicine.
The updated health guidelines include 49 food recommendations, fitness programs, and what tests women should do, such as ultrasound, tetanus vaccinations, blood tests, and malaria. In addition to this, pregnant women will now benefit from reliable info regarding constipation, nausea, and back pain.
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