Jahnavi Sarma
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Written By: Jahnavi Sarma | Updated : June 3, 2020 11:43 AM IST
pregnancy
Sleep is necessary for overall well-being. If you suffer from any sleep disorder, you are at a greater risk of many health conditions. This is particularly true for pregnant women. If you are an expecting mom, you need to get your required amount of sleep every night. Otherwise, you may face some unwanted complications. Still birth is one such complication. It is established that smoking, advanced maternal age, diabetes, obesity and drug abuse are a few risk factors for stillbirths. But now, a study says that sleeping more than nine hours per night during pregnancy may lead to late stillbirth.
According to a study at Division of Sleep Medicine, Department of Neurology and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Michigan Medicine came to this conclusion after analyzing online surveys of 153 women who had experienced a late stillbirth (on or after 28 weeks of pregnancy) within the previous month and 480 women with an ongoing third-trimester pregnancy or who had recently delivered a live born baby during the same period. The journal Birth published this study.
According to researchers, there is an association between lengthy periods of undisturbed maternal sleep and stillbirths that were independent of other risk factors. But they caution that further research is needed to better understand the relationship and what it means for pregnant women. "Pregnant women often report waking up and getting up in the middle of the night," they say and add that while multiple awakenings during the night may concern some women, in the context of stillbirth it appears to be protective. They admit that further studies need to delve deeper into what may drive the relationship between maternal sleep and stillbirths, with particular focus on how the autonomic nervous system, the control system that regulates bodily function, and the hormonal system are regulated during sleep in late pregnancy.
Researchers of the above-mentioned study say that blood pressure reaches its lowest point during sleep. But when someone is awakened, there is a surge in the nervous system activity that causes transient increases in blood pressure. They say that these brief increases in blood pressure may be able to prevent long periods of relatively low pressure. This is important because low blood pressure can cause fetal growth problems, preterm birth and stillbirth.
At the same time, researchers say that this does not mean that pregnant women should wake themselves up at night. Disruptive sleep comes with its own ill effects. It can lead to poor pregnancy outcomes, including growth restriction and preterm growth. They rue the fact that while there is evidence that very disrupted sleep and clinical sleep disorders can lead to poor pregnancy outcomes, few studies have looked at the opposite end of the spectrum, such as long periods of undisturbed sleep.
The findings of this study indicate that maternal sleep plays a role in fetal wellbeing. Researchers are hopeful that understanding the role of maternal sleep may help identify interventions that may help pregnant women.
