medical news

Exercise may help pregnant women quit smoking

For pregnant women who want to quit smoking, a brisk walk can temporarily stave off tobacco cravings, says a Canadian study.

Previous research has shown that exercise can interrupt nicotine cravings for both men and women. Whether the same was true for expecting mothers was unclear because pregnant women have increased metabolism, which can intensify longings for a cigarette, the researchers write in the journal Addictive Behaviors.

“This was the first time we have been able to replicate the findings with pregnant smokers,” Harry Prapavessis said.

Prapavessis, director of the Exercise and Health Psychology Laboratory at Western University in Ontario, Canada, led the research.

According to his team’s results, 15 to 20 minutes of walking at a mild to moderate pace is sufficient to ward off cravings.

For the study, researchers recruited 30 pregnant women in their second trimester in Canada and England. All of the women smoked more than five cigarettes a day and were not regular exercisers.

Half of the women were assigned to walk on a treadmill and the rest to watch a home gardening video for 20 minutes. Both groups did not smoke for between 15 and 19 hours before entering the lab.

The walkers reported an average 30 percent reduction in the desire to smoke based on a seven-point scale. But the cravings returned. Thirty minutes after exercising, the same group of women reported only a 17 percent craving reduction.

The exercising women also reported less irritability, restlessness, tension and other withdrawal symptoms. But because of the study’s small size, those results could have happened by chance.

“This translates not as a cure for quitting, but it can be part of a strategy,” said Dr. Sharon Phelan, who was not involved in the study.

Phelan is a fellow with the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque.

“The challenge is that there isn’t one reason why pregnant women have an addiction,” Phelan said.

“I think it’s a very positive study,” said Dr. Raul Artal of Saint Louis University School of Medicine in Missouri. Artal helped write exercise and pregnancy guidelines for ACOG.

He said the new study will need to be repeated according to medicine’s gold standard of testing – a randomized, controlled trial. “But, based on common sense, the message is good,” he said.

Prapavessis said his team’s results can only be applied to women about 25 years old, the average age in the study. But, “I would like to think that we can repeat the findings with older or younger pregnant smokers.”

Prapavessis pointed out that because of the social stigma associated with smoking while pregnant, recruiting pregnant women for such studies can be extremely difficult.

The next step, he said, would be to repeat the results with women walking in natural environments outside of their homes. “We want to see if this craving effect can be reproduced when women go for a brisk walk for about 15 minutes in their natural setting,” he said.

Pregnant women also have the option to try nicotine replacement therapy drugs, like skin patches or lozenges, but more evidence is needed to know if these are completely safe during pregnancy, Phelan said.

To help pregnant smokers quit, Phelan stressed the importance of understanding the underlying reasons why a pregnant woman smokes. “It’s like when someone has a fever. You can treat it with an aspirin, but you haven’t gotten to the underlying cause.”

“One therapy for everyone isn’t going to fit all,” Phelan noted. Still, regardless of whether a woman has stopped smoking, exercise offers positive benefits, like improved circulation and muscle tone she said.

ACOG supports 30 minutes of light exercise like walking three or four times a week during pregnancy, Phelan said, but pregnant women should always talk with their healthcare provider before beginning exercise.

To beat cigarette cravings, she said, “This is a valid option to suggest to women and it may be helpful for some, but not to others.”

Source: Zee news

Mid life economic recessions linked to later cognitive decline

The greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression may wreak lasting neurological damage on a generation of Americans who lost jobs, homes, and even marriages — with steeper levels of cognitive decline as they age.

Older, wizened Americans recognized trouble on Sept. 28, 2008, as Congressmen rejected a massive Wall Street bailout, voting one by one as the Dow Jones Industrial Average continued to slide, thus beginning the Great Recession. Although Washington later approved controversial bailouts and fiscal stimuli, macroeconomic malaise blossomed millions of times over as personal recessions deeply ingrained in the mind.

Now, economic recovery continues in the United States with record corporate profits and broad public support for raising the federal minimum wage to more than $10 per hour, restoring the wage floor to pre-inflation 1968 levels. However, painful repercussions from the past half-dozen years of recession and recovery continue with downward career mobility and lowered expectations for millions of Americans, with many European populations faring worse throughout the 28-country economic block.

Those personal recessions may later hit middle-aged people the hardest, investigators from the University of Luxembourg find. In analyzing data from more than 12,000 Europeans throughout 11 countries in the European Union, investigator Anja Leist finds recessionary troubles most damaging to middle-aged men in their mid- to late-forties and women ages 25-44.

“Our study was motivated by previous evidence that working conditions are associated with later-life cognitive function and decline,” Leist and her colleagues wrote in a study published Wednesday. “Our findings provide evidence that economic recessions experienced at vulnerable periods in midlife are associated with decreased later-life cognitive function and that part of this association may operate through the link of recessions with working conditions and career trajectory.”

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When hit by economic setbacks at this most vulnerable point in career trajectory, people in early middle-age suffer a hampered ability to build “cognitive reserve” — the neurological equivalent to a retirement savings account.

Despite some beliefs held by conservatives and libertarians, the investigators assumed for the purpose of study that individuals wage little control over large macroeconomic forces, meaning that people across a broad spectrum of intellectual functioning would be harmed by massive shocks to the economy, such as the recent global recession. Leist and her colleagues analyzed data from study subjects assessed for cognitive ability in 2004 through 2005, and then again in 2006 through 2007, to determine whether past recessions had affected them as they aged into retirement.

Those results they linked to detailed work histories collected retrospectively between 2008 and 2009, and analyzed along with factors, such as self-rated health, material deprivation, occupational status, self-reported language and math skills, educational attainment, and even the number of books in the home. Among men, those in their mid- to late-forties had lived through an average of 0.73 recessions, whereas women, between the ages of 35 and 44, had lived through 1.33.

In the analysis, men and women who’d endured economic recession scored lower on cognitive tests than others, suggesting effects lasting a lifetime.

Source: Medical daily

Too Much Sport for Teenagers May Be bad for health

Peak scores of well-being for teenagers occurred with about 14 hours a week of sport practice, or twice the recommended 7 hours, but higher sport durations independently predicted poor well-being, according to a Swiss survey study published online November 21 in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

“Sport practice is widely encouraged, both in guidelines and in clinical practice, because of its broad range of positive effects on health,” write Arnaud Merglen, MD from the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and colleagues. “However, very limited evidence directly supports this statement among adolescents and the sport duration that we should recommend remains unknown. We aimed to determine sport durations that were associated with poor well-being.”

Between February 2009 and January 2010, the investigators recruited 1245 adolescents, aged 16 to 20 years, from various settings in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, including sport centers, peers of sport-practicing adolescents, and Web sites.

Using answers to a Web-based questionnaire, the investigators categorized weekly sport practice of the participants into 4 groups, from low (0 – 3.5 hours) to average (approximately equal to the recommended 7 hours; 3.6 – 10.5 hours), high (≈14 hours; 10.6 – 17.5 hours), and very high (>17.5 hours). The 5-item World Health Organization well-being index, scored from 0 to 25, with scores below 13 indicating poor well-being, allowed evaluation of well-being.

Participants had an average age just younger than 18 years, half were male, and 8.9% were overweight or obese. Sports participation was low in 35.2%, average in 41.5%, high in 18.5%, and very high in 4.8% of participants.

Very High Sports Practice Predicts Low Well-Being

The average well-being score for the entire sample was 17. Those in the very high sports practice group had more than twice the risk for poor well-being than those in the average group (odds ratio [OR], 2.29; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.11 – 4.72), as did those in the low-activity group (OR, 2.33; 95% CI, 1.58 – 3.44). In contrast, those in the high-activity group had about half the risk for poor well-being as those in the average group (OR, 0.46; 95% CI, 0.23 – 0.93).

“We found an inverted, U-shaped relationship between weekly sport practice duration and well-being among adolescents,” the study authors write. “The peak scores of well-being were around 14 h per week of sport practice, corresponding to twice the recommended 7 h. Practicing higher sport durations was an independent risk factor of poor well-being.”

Limitations of this study include possible selection bias, observational design, reliance on self-report, and unknown direction of causality.

“[H]igher levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines have been reported in very high and chronic sport practice, with a negative impact on physical and mental health,” the authors conclude.

“These results highlight the importance for physicians, caring for adolescents, to follow-up their level of sport practice and concurrently inquire about their well-being.”

Source: Med scape

PTSD Linked to Obesity in Women

Women with symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are more likely to become overweight or obese, according to a study published online Nov. 20 in JAMA Psychiatry.

Laura D. Kubzansky, PhD, from the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, and colleagues used data from the subsample of the Nurses’ Health Study II (54,224 participants aged 24–44 years in 1989) to examine whether women with PTSD symptoms were more likely to gain weight and become obese compared to trauma-exposed women without PTSD symptoms or women without trauma exposure or PTSD symptoms.

The researchers found that body mass index (BMI) increased more steeply during follow-up for women with ≥4 PTSD symptoms before cohort initiation (1989). BMI trajectory did not differ by PTSD status before onset of PTSD among women who developed PTSD symptoms in 1989 or later. Women with ≥4 PTSD symptoms had a faster rise in BMI after PTSD symptom onset. For women with a normal BMI in 1989, onset of ≥4 PTSD symptoms in 1989 or later correlated with a significantly increased risk of becoming overweight or obese (odds ratio, 1.36). After adjustment for depression, these effects were maintained.

“The presence of PTSD symptoms should raise clinician concerns about physical health problems that may develop and prompt closer attention to weight status,” the authors write.

Source: MPR

 

Rotavirus Vaccination Protect Children Against Seizures

A new study suggests an additional—and somewhat surprising—potential benefit of vaccinating children against rotavirus, a common cause of diarrhea and vomiting. Besides protecting kids from intestinal illness caused by rotavirus, immunization may also reduce the risk of related seizures, according to findings published in Clinical Infectious Diseases and available online.

Lead study author Daniel C. Payne, PhD, MSPH, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and colleagues from CDC and other institutions carried out a retrospective analysis that included roughly a quarter of a million U.S. children born between March 2006 and November 2009. All were enrolled in the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a nationwide project that collects data for vaccine safety research, and included 186,502 children fully immunized against rotavirus (74.4 percent) and 64,099 who were not (25.6 percent).

The researchers found that children who were fully vaccinated against rotavirus had an approximately 20 percent reduced risk of seizure-related hospitalizations and emergency department visits during the year following vaccination, compared to unvaccinated children. “The protective association we found between rotavirus vaccination and seizures is another good reason for having your child fully vaccinated against rotavirus,” Payne says.

Although several mechanisms could explain the protective association, the most probable, the study authors wrote, is that “vaccination directly prevents systemic rotavirus infection, including extra-intestinal complications involving the central nervous system.” Seizures have been observed in children with acute intestinal illness caused by rotavirus: A large multi-center Canadian study from 2007, for example, estimated that 7 percent of young patients hospitalized with rotavirus illness experienced seizures.

The authors of this latest study estimated that rotavirus vaccination could potentially save more than $7 million in U.S. health care costs each year by preventing approximately 1,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 emergency room visits for seizures among young children. “Caring for children who have seizures can be expensive and emotionally taxing for families,” Payne says. “Seizures sometimes lead to painful procedures, medication regimens, trips to the emergency room, or hospital stays.”

The reduction in seizure risk the researchers found complements the already well-documented benefits of vaccinating kids against rotavirus—declines in doctor’s office visits, emergency room visits, and hospitalizations for severe diarrhea—noted Geoffrey A. Weinberg, MD, of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, in an accompanying editorial.

“Work such as this not only is interesting scientifically, but provides yet another reason to strongly promote universal rotavirus immunization,” Weinberg wrote. “In addition, the work provides us an opportunity to reflect on the fact that sometimes, unexpected effects of vaccination are beneficial and are a cause for celebration, rather than the more commonly publicized concern for unexpected adverse effects.”

Source : ICT

Babies Seem To Know Themselves Soon After Birth

Understanding you exist as a person happens a lot sooner than you might think.

A study involving 40 cute, pudgy babies found that they were aware of their bodies — and even displayed a sense of ownership of them — less than two days after being born.

Both of those qualities are key ingredients in realizing your own existence, says the study’s lead author, Maria Laura Filippetti, a doctoral candidate specializing in cognitive development at Birkbeck College, University of London.

“Body awareness refers to the feeling of being alive,” she told Shots. “Body ownership refers to the feeling of having a body, the sense that this body belongs to me.”

Past studies reveled how important these two aspects of human life were for infants, but this study was the first to discover it in newborns at birth.

How did the researchers figure it out? Filippetti and her colleagues tested the infants’ ability to recognize themselves using a test similar to the old rubber hand illusion.

That test tricks the mind into thinking a fake rubber hand actually belongs to a person’s body. Researchers lightly stroke a person’s real hand with a paintbrush while it’s hidden from his or her view. Simultaneously, the researchers stroke a rubber hand that’s in plain sight. Stroking the two at the same time and in the same places means the person feels the paintbrush while seeing the action elsewhere.

Normally, a person’s brain associates the feeling of one’s hand with the sight of the hand. But the brain can be confused by a trick like this and start to think the rubber hand is the one it should pay attention to.

For the infants, the test was very similar. Again, a paintbrush was used, but this time the researchers stroked the babies’ cheeks as they watched a video of the same thing happening to another baby.

The researchers tested how the babies behaved when the paintbrush was touched at different times and at the same time on their faces. Since babies can’t talk, their researchers gauged the babies’ reactions by measuring how long they looked at the baby in the video, Filippetti says.

“A longer looking time for a stimulus compared to another one is a measure of discrimination and preference for that stimulus,” she tells Shots.

The newborns did watch the other baby in the video longer when the paintbrush strokes on both happened simultaneously, rather than at different times, or not at all. That response to simultaneous stimulation shows a sense of body awareness and ownership, the researchers say. Here’s a video of how the test went.

The researcher also performed a second experiment with a twist: They showed the babies the same video turned upside down. The babies tested didn’t respond to the simultaneous paintbrush strokes.

The study was published Thursday in Current Biology.

Filippetti concedes that her tests don’t prove with absolute certainty that the infants identified themselves. But she says the work suggests that “the same factors known to be involved in body awareness in adults are present at birth.”

Filippetti says that understanding the typical development of self could someday lead to insights into atypical developments, such as autism spectrum disorder.

For the babies in the experiment, a long nap was probably a richer reward than any contribution to science they might have made.

Source: NPR

Video Game Creators Are Using Apps To Teach Empathy

Much of the modern education reform movement has centered around the drive for data. Standardized tests now gauge whether children are at grade level seemingly every few months. Kids are observed, measured and sorted almost constantly.

In Silicon Valley, a $20 billion industry does much the same thing — but for a different purpose.

Video game design has become a data-driven industry where games evolve depending on how they are played.

Now, some game designers are hoping to take these new skills and apply them back to education. But not in a classroom — they want to teach with a game on an iPad.

From Football To Feelings

More than 30 years ago, Trip Hawkins left Apple and founded Electronic Arts, the company behind EA Sports. The man who helped make Madden NFL a cultural icon now has a new vision for games: He wants to teach.

For sports video games, Hawkins brought game designers together with experts in the field — athletes and statisticians. Now he’s bringing counselors into the mix. He wants to give those counselors data about what kids are actually doing in the games they play.

Analyzing data on how people play has become a huge part of the gaming industry.

“It’s incredibly important,” Hawkins says. “In the past you couldn’t do it at all because the customer was playing a game in the basement on a machine that’s not hooked up to the Internet. Once you bring the Internet into the equation, it’s much easier to figure out what your problem is and how to improve the product.”

So now, he says, they can apply that to other new markets, like education and social development.

Hawkins thinks a well-designed video game can teach kids empathy — how to listen to each other and control negative emotions. It could teach children basic skills that would ultimately help them get along better with each other and adults out in the real world.

Working Through Failure

Hawkins has gathered experts in social development and learning, and they’re creating a new game called If. In the game, players visit an imaginary village called Greenberry.

“Greenberry is a world in which there are cats and there are dogs, and they don’t get along well,” says Jessica Berlinski, who helped design and write the game’s story. “So part of the challenge is to figure out why, and then working to heal that.”

As kids progress through the game, they begin to rebuild the village of Greenberry. And kind of like in Pokemon, they collect magical creatures who enhance their power.

Sometimes the creatures might die — but the game does something totally different: It helps them work through it. There’s a virtual counseling session with a community leader, who teaches kids deep breathing exercises and has a dialogue about feelings of loss.

Berlinski, a founder of the educational tech company If You Can, says one goal of the game is to get kids to navigate interpersonal challenges and failures.

“The messaging that kids get in real life and certainly in schools is not that failure is OK — but in game environments, 80 percent of the time, gamers are failing, yet they are completely motivated to keep going,” she says. “So something is going on there that is very positive. And we need to capitalize on that.”

Will It Work?

But Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist at Harvard and author ofThe Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, is concerned that kids and their parents already spend too much time on devices.

“Nothing — no new app, no new game — can replace the old truth, I think, that children thrive, that families thrive, in the context of healthy real-life relationships,” she says.

Still, Steiner-Adair says, a game that helps kids practice skills like listening and working through difficult emotions might be useful if it’s played in moderation. “I am cautious, but I am guardedly optimistic that there could be some kind of computer game that could strengthen children’s social and emotional intelligence,” she says.

In the end, even Hawkins is the first to admit that kids won’t actually play this game or learn anything unless the game is fun.

And building a kind of virtual counseling session into a fun video game is a tough trick.

Source: KAWC

Headache: Top 5 tests and treatments to avoid

Doctors who specialize in treating head pain, such as chronic migraines, are the latest to list the procedures and treatments they think have risks or costs that may outweigh the benefits to patients.

The American Headache Society’s list is part of the Choosing Wisely campaign from the ABIM Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation established by the American Board of Internal Medicine. The campaign has seen cancer doctors, eye doctors and chest surgeons naming the overused or unproven practices their peers should avoid and patients should question.

The newest Choosing Wisely list was published Thursday in the journal Headache.

“The article and recommendations identify situations that are felt by experts to be cases where patients and doctors should think very carefully before they decide to use that particular treatment or intervention,” said Dr. Elizabeth Loder, an author of the new recommendations.

Loder is the president of the American Headache Society, and chief of the Division of Headache and Pain at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

All tests and treatments have risks, Loder said. For example, imaging techniques such as CT scans expose patients to potentially cancer-causing radiation, and certain pain medications sometimes used to treat headaches are easy to get hooked on.

The goal of the recommendations is to encourage discussion between patients and their doctors about which tests are overall beneficial to patients, she said.

“The purpose is to start a conversation about situations, tests, procedures and interventions that do not necessarily benefit the patient, and sometimes can even cause problems,” Loder said.

To come up with the recommendations, Loder and her coauthors asked physician members of the American Headache Society (AHS) to identify tests and treatments they view as being used incorrectly or too often, and which methods of care had benefits too small to outweigh the risks.

The researchers evaluated more than 100 items suggested by AHS members, distilling the list down to five items based on current evidence.

The guidelines advise against imaging the brains of patients who get headaches that have not changed over time.

They also discourage the long-term use of over-the-counter pain pills to treat headaches, and recommend that physicians avoid using certain pain medications – opioids like oxycodone and drugs containing butalbital like Fioricet – for patients who get headaches often.

Finally, physicians should not perform computed tomography, or CT, on a patient with a headache when magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, is available, except if it’s an emergency, the recommendations state.

The recommendations, Loder said, “are a nice distillation for patients when thinking about their care.” Patients and their families can use the guidelines to start a conversation with their doctor about the pros and cons of a given test or procedure.

“In addition to thinking about the good things that may come about from interventions, it’s also important to think about situations in which caution can be used,” Loder told Reuters Health.

Source: Global post

Better diet tied to higher quality of life in old age

Older adults who follow dietary guidelines tend to have a better quality of life and less trouble getting around and taking care of themselves, according to a new study.

Not many prior studies had tried to tackle that issue, researchers said.

“Our paper showed that maintaining an overall optimal diet quality will be beneficial for preserving the general well-being of older adults,” lead author Bamini Gopinath told Reuters Health in an email.

Gopinath is a senior research fellow with the Westmead Millennium Institute for Medical Research at the University of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia.

“Adhering to national dietary guidelines which is typified by high intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fish could be beneficial in maintaining a good quality of life and functional ability such as shopping, household duties, meal preparation, and taking their own medication,” she said.

Her study included 1,305 men and women age 55 and over that were part of a large Australian study of common eye diseases and general health.

Participants filled out questionnaires about what they ate and how often in 1992 to 1994.
Researchers scored each person’s diet on a scale from 0 to 20 based the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating. Higher scores indicated better diets.

The one-quarter of participants with the highest-quality diets had scores above 11.1. The one-quarter with the poorest diets scored 8.1 and below, the researchers reported in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Five and ten years after reporting on their diets, participants completed surveys assessing their quality of life with regard to physical health, mental health, social functioning and vitality. Each area was measured on a scale of 0 to 100.

On average, participants with the highest diet scores also reported a better quality of life.

Physical function was almost six points higher among the healthiest eaters than the least healthy. General health was four points higher among healthy eaters and vitality was five points higher.

However, there were no differences on measures of mental health or social functioning, based on diet.

The researchers also assessed how well people could perform basic and instrumental activities of daily living 10 and 15 years after the diet surveys.

Basic activities include being able to eat, dress and groom without assistance and the ability to walk alone. Instrumental activities include the ability to go shopping, use a telephone, handle money and travel beyond walking distance.

There was no difference in how well people performed basic activities of daily living based on their diets. But participants with the highest diet scores were half as likely to be impaired when it came to instrumental activities compared to those with the worst diets.

The findings don’t prove diet, itself, was responsible for the differences in quality of life and how well people performed daily tasks.

But Gopinath believes they could contribute to the evidence needed to come up with strategies that help an aging population make dietary changes.

“If older adults didn’t make healthy choices when they were younger, they may need to change their habits to get the necessary nutrients for a better quality of life. In fact, many older adults are coming up short, when it comes to essential vitamins, minerals, and fiber,” Ruth Frechman told Reuters Health in an email.

She is a registered dietitian and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and was not involved in the study.

Frechman said people can turn to the US Department of Agriculture’s MyPlate guide for help with healthy eating.

“To reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer, half of the grains should be whole grains, such as whole grain pasta, brown rice or oatmeal. It’s also important to include low-fat or fat-free sources of dairy for healthy bones,” she added.

Source: GMA News

Adopt healthy pregnancy habits to avoid preterm birth

Being pregnant is one of the happiest moments in life. Despite the excitement that comes with it, it could be hard for you as you need to take extra care of your body and the fetus inside you during this time. What is preterm birth? According to World Health Organization (WHO), preterm is defined as babies born alive before 37 weeks of pregnancy are completed.

There are sub-categories of preterm birth, based on gestational age:

Extremely preterm (born at less than 28 weeks of pregnancy).
Very preterm (born between 28 to 32 weeks of pregnancy).

Moderate to late preterm (born between 32 to 37 weeks of pregnancy).
Sometimes, even a healthy pregnancy may make you go into preterm labor because it is usually not anticipated. Preterm birth also happens because the causes are not completely understood.

But adopting healthy pregnancy habits may help keep your baby until he or she is fully ready to face the world.

How to prevent it?
Below are some simple tips as suggested by health experts that may help avoid preterm birth:
Eat healthy: This is the time that you eat a balanced diet which is good for you, your baby and pregnancy. Make sure that you get all necessary nutrients in right proportions every day — such as Vitamins A, C, E, omega-3 fatty acids, calcium, magnesium, iron, zinc and most importantly, the well-known baby- friendly folic acid. This can help avoid preterm labour.
Adopt healthy lifestyle: If you smoke, drink or use any kinds of drugs, you must quit.

Get enough fluids: Remember to take at least 8 glasses of water or fluids daily to keep yourself hydrated. Dehydration can cause premature contractions. Keeping yourself hydrated can also increase the chances of keeping baby put.

Say ‘no’ to stress: Stress is not directly linked to preterm, but try not to take stress for your own benefit during this time. Instead ask for help and try to relax. Check your weight: Gaining too much or too little weight during pregnancy can up your preterm labour risk. Being overweight can increase your odds of getting gestational diabetes and preeclampsia (both of which up preterm) whereas being underweight can advance your due date as well as make your baby born too small.

Prenatal vitamins: Do not neglect taking those pills, they are not just good for you and your growing baby’s health, but will also increase the chances that you’ll carry to term.
Don’t hold your urine: During pregnancy, you should never hold your urine. Doing that can inflame your bladder and as a result of which, your uterus could be aggravated leading to contractions. Holding your pee could also cause urinary tract infections (UTI), another source of preterm contractions.

Source: Journey Line