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Nowadays, women give birth longer than 50 years ago.

 
, medical expert
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
 
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02 April 2012, 16:19

In our time, women give birth longer than 50 years ago - this conclusion was reached by researchers from the National Institutes of Health of the United States (NIH), analyzing data on 140 thousand births.

The study analyzed data on births during the 1960s and 2000s. It turned out that in the past half-century, the first stage of labor, when the cervix is being opened, in previously unfertilized women increased by 2.6 hours. In women who do not give birth for the first time, this stage now began to last for 2 hours more.

The NIH study showed that now in the US, powerful methods of anesthesia during childbirth are more often used. Epidural anesthesia - the introduction of painkillers into the cerebrospinal fluid - now receives more than 50% of parturient women; in the 1960s they were used only in 4% of cases.

It is known that epidural anesthesia usually slows labor, but this does not explain the trend completely. So in the 2000s, doctors began to use the hormone oxytocin more often, accelerating labor: now they are used in 31% of cases, and in the 1960s - in 12%.

The study also showed that today newborns are born on average five days earlier, and at the same time weigh more than 50 years ago.

Modern women in labor are on average 4 years older than those who gave birth in the 1960s. Future mothers became fuller. In the past generation, the body mass index - that is, the ratio between height and weight of a man - before pregnancy was about 23 kg / m², then in the current - 24.9.

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