(Reuters Health) - Military women who give birth within six months of returning from deployment are twice as likely to have premature babies compared to other soldiers, a U.S. study suggests.
Researchers examined data on 12,877 births to U.S. soldiers from 2011 to 2014 and found that, overall, 6.1 percent of these deliveries were premature. But for mothers who had returned from deployment within the past six months, 11.7 percent of deliveries were premature, versus just 5.9 percent of births to mothers who had completed their deployments more than six months earlier.
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While the current study didn’t examine what caused the preterm births, it’s possible that stressors such as inadequate or disrupted sleep, psychological stress, trauma or grief during pregnancy might play a role, Shaw said.
“One can reasonably imagine several such stressors may be at play when service women transition geographically, physically and emotionally from deployed life back to the U.S.,” Shaw said.
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Link to full article written by Lisa Rapaport: Recent return from deployment tied to preterm births for military women
SOURCE: bit.ly/2FeWezB American Journal of Epidemiology, online March 1, 2018.
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