Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 12, 1995 TAG: 9501130027
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BOSTON LENGTH: Medium
\ Women should wait at least nine months between pregnancies to improve the chances of producing healthy full-term infants, a study concludes.
The advice appears to be especially important for black mothers. The study found that spacing babies closely together is more likely to result in undersize babies for blacks than for whites.
Prematurity is the major cause of infant deaths in the United States. The research suggests that black mothers' tendency to get pregnant again quickly is one reason their infant mortality rate is twice as high as whites'.
``If we could encourage women to give themselves nine months between pregnancies, we are likely to see a narrowing of the difference in pregnancy outcomes between black and white women in the United States,'' Dr. James Rawlings said.
Women need to pause between pregnancies so they can build up the nutritional reserves necessary for a growing fetus.
Rawlings conducted the study with his wife, Virginia, a nutritionist, and Dr. John A. Read at the Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash. It is published in today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Infant mortality has fallen dramatically for both blacks and whites in recent decades, but the gap between the races has remained stubbornly constant.
Experts once attributed this largely to poor prenatal care for black women. While this and other effects of poverty may play a role, newer evidence suggests the reasons are more complex.
For instance, one recent study found that even the babies of college-educated blacks are twice as likely as whites to die in infancy.
Another found that black mothers are twice as likely as women of other races to drink, smoke and use drugs during pregnancy, and this could help explain at least some of the difference.
The latest study is especially noteworthy because it was conducted at an Army hospital, where all the mothers received high-quality prenatal care, and black families had about the same income as whites.
Despite these equal circumstances, 7 percent of the black mothers studied delivered premature babies, compared with 3 percent of whites.
Birth spacing explained the difference, the researchers said.
The researchers studied 1,922 women who had each delivered at least two babies at the hospitals during a 10-year period. Among the findings:
Black women who put less than nine months between pregnancies triple their risk of delivering premature and underweight babies.
For reasons that are unclear, white women needed less time between babies. Only those who waited less than three months to have another baby increased their risk of giving birth prematurely.
by CNB