Many pregnant women who suffer from asthma are putting their unborn child's health at risk by failing to use the right medication, according to a University of Adelaide researcher.

New research from Perth's Telethon Institute for Child Health Research has found that children of mums who had low levels of Vitamin D during pregnancy are twice as likely to have language difficulties.

If you develop pregnancy-related hypertensive disorders or diabetes, you may have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease later in life, according to research in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

In a study presented at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's annual meeting, The Pregnancy Meeting™, in Dallas, Texas, researchers report findings that indicate that the risk of obstetric intervention is lower for women who deliver or intend to deliver outside of hospitals, but there are some higher risks for newborns intended for home births compared to hospital births.

Exercise is the key to overcoming the adverse metabolic effects passed on to offspring by their overweight mothers, with research showing for the first time these effects can be almost completely reversed through physical activity.

A newly available DNA-based prenatal blood test that can identify a pregnancy with Down syndrome can also identify two additional chromosome abnormalities: trisomy 18 (Edwards syndrome) and trisomy 13 (Patau syndrome). The test for all three defects can be offered as early as 10 weeks of pregnancy to women who have been identified as being at high risk for these abnormalities.

A large population-based study in Sweden indicates that there is no link between smoking during pregnancy and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in children. The study, led by Dr. Brian Lee, an assistant professor at Drexel University and a team of international collaborators, will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders and was published online ...

Children exposed to maternal gestational diabetes mellitus and low socioeconomic status, particularly in combination, appear to be at an increased risk of developing childhood ADHD, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

A new research study published in the January 2012 edition of The FASEB Journal describes findings that could lead to a non-invasive test that would let expecting mothers know the sex of their baby as early as the first trimester. Specifically, researchers from South Korea discovered that various ratios of two enzymes (DYS14/GAPDH), which can be extracted from a pregnant mother's ...

As the practice of freezing and transferring 'surplus' embryos widens rapidly, concerns about whether the freezing process may interfere with the viability of the embryos are often raised by patients. The study highlights that miscarriage is less likely to occur after the transfer of fresh embryos compared with frozen-thawed embryos, but also that the age of the embryos at the time of freezing ...