Pregnancy and Childbirth Planning for Pregnancy

Higher Pregnancy Risk for Women with IBD

Women with inflammatory bowel disease are more likely to have premature and underweight babies, say researchers.

Treating inflammatory bowel disease, which includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, involves medications and changes and diet. And while symptoms can be kept under control, it seems that women with these diseases have a higher risk during pregnancy of giving birth too early or having a baby that is under normal weight.

It is estimated that about 500,000 women in the United States are currently living with an inflammatory bowel disease. These diseases cause swelling in the digestive tract, which can lead to abdominal pain and bleeding. Some medications can help, but patients with these diseases are often instructed to keep to a strict diet to reduce their symptoms.

Most importantly, inflammatory bowel disease tends to appear between the ages of 15 and 35, the years when a woman is most likely to get pregnant.

“Inflammatory bowel disease has a typical onset in peak reproductive years,” write the study authors from St. Mary’s Hospital in London in the journal Gut.

For the study, researchers analyzed data from over 324,000 women, of which almost 4,000 had either Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis. Ultimately women with either disorder were almost twice a likely to have a child born prematurely. Also, these women were more than twice as likely to have a child born below normal weight.

Both premature and low birth weight babies have a higher risk of serious chronic illnesses and developmental problems. In fact, the rate of congenital birth defects was more than twice as high among babies born to mothers with these diseases as healthy women.

Additionally, women with inflammatory bowel disease were more likely to have had a caesarian section as their healthy peers.

The researchers are not sure what causes these discrepancies, but they do believe that if a woman becomes pregnant while her symptoms are active, the risk of complications would probably be higher.

“[Women with irritable bowel disease] should be treated as a potentially high risk group,” wrote the authors, who added that any woman with this disease should consult with her doctor prior to getting pregnant about the ways she can reduce