20% of pregnant women suffer from a miscarriage and a fifth of them end up losing their baby. In total data, 4% of women suffer a miscarriage due to natural causes before reaching 20 weeks of gestation.
Until now there was no way to know which pregnancy, of those declared at risk, would continue and which would be interrupted. Now, thanks to a group of scientists from the United Kingdom, it is possible to know with a fairly high reliability which pregnancy will continue and which will most likely end in abortion.
It is not a revolutionary test or any magical device that predicts the future, but a series of variables that can be measured relatively easily, whose combination can tell us one thing or another with respect to a given pregnancy.
Researchers have baptized the system as "PVI" (Pregnancy Feasibility Index) and to find this system they did a study with 102 pregnant women aged 6 to 10 weeks who had suffered vaginal bleeding and who had been diagnosed as threatened with abortion. spontaneous.
During five weeks they performed various analyzes to assess the levels of progesterone and chorionic gonadotropin hormone, they took records about the level of pain of women and the appearance of vaginal bleeding and the amount, they did ultrasound and other tests, all to try to know what each of the factors related to the probability of having a miscarriage.
After those five weeks 22 of the pregnancies were lost, while 80 continued. This served to find the reason for what happened and the researchers found six factors directly related to the future of pregnancy: Family history of fertility problems, the size of the fetus, its gestational age, the amount of blood lost and the levels of progesterone and HCG.
If a woman had only one of these factors altered, if it was given separately, it was not considered determinative, but if two of them were combined (the amount of blood lost and HCG levels) they could predict quite reliably which pregnancy would continue probably and which one would not come to term.
When I say quite reliably I mean that PVI was successful in predicting viable pregnancies by 94% and 77% of those who were interrupted were correctly predicted.
With this system, the true potential risk of a pregnancy is predicted quite economically to know where more care and more precautions should be taken. Thus, tests such as amniocentesis, which is not without risks, as we know, can also be avoided.
Undoubtedly, this is a new development that many future parents will thank for the good of their babies and with which health professionals will be able to speak with more knowledge about the cause of the real risk in each particular pregnancy. Now you just need to increase the reliability percentage, although it is already high, it could be even more so that it can work with greater consequence.
The only problem I see is the fear that parents can enter the body if you are one of the couples who are told that they will most likely lose their baby, although, well, they already have the fear, because The symptoms are already occurring when the necessary measurements are made.
