Women who wait just a short time to become pregnant after delivering a child may put themselves and their next baby at greater risk for adverse events, a new study suggests. “We found for women of all ages, pregnancy within 12 months after a live birth come with risks,” said study leader Laura Schummers, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia. The study was part of Schummers’ dissertation at the Harvard School of Public Health. When Schummers and her colleagues started the study, they thought they might find lower risks in the older women. That’s because most of these short interval pregnancies in older women are by choice: the women are at an age where their f
First-time mothers in the United States grew older on average over the past decade while total fertility rates declined, a new government report shows. The average age of new mothers increased between 2007 and 2017, according to the data brief from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. In that time period, new moms in rural areas grew older by 1.3 years, in suburban areas by 1.5 years and in urban areas by 1.8 years. First-time mothers in rural counties were younger, on average, than their counterparts in more urban regions for each of the years within the time span studied. For example, first-time mothers in rural counties averaged 23.2 year
In the first publication from the U.S. on surgical techniques and outcomes of single ovary removal for fertility preservation in girls, surgeons from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago report that the procedure caused no complications and can be performed laparoscopically, on an outpatient basis, without delaying treatment for cancer or other therapies posing high risk of infertility. They present experience with 64 girls, aged 12 years on average, with the youngest only 5 months old at the time of surgery. Their findings were published in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery. "We describe the unique technical nuances of removing a tiny ovary without damaging it, since it needs
