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Last Updated: May 8th, 2008 - 20:33:00
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The future of thousands of Albertans may not be as bright simply because they were born premature.
Many factors can influence premature birth and a multi-disciplinary research team, including researchers at the University of Lethbridge, hope to find better ways of predicting who’s at risk and develop interventions that could help narrow the gap for preemies.
“The key problem is we have the highest preterm birth rate in Canada here in Alberta,” said Gerlinde Metz, a U of L neuroscience professor and Alberta Heritage Medical Scholar. “There’s a cost to society so we want to address this problem on all kinds of different levels.”
Every year, about 4,000 babies in Alberta are born at less than 37 weeks gestation. Preterm birth is associated with long-term disability such as cerebral palsy, blindness, acute and chronic lung diseases, learning and behaviour problems and medical conditions like hypertension that may manifest in adulthood.
The impact on the child, their family and the community is lifelong and a significant enough problem to warrant a team grant worth $5 million over five years from the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research.
Disabilities related to preterm birth are wide ranging and long lasting. Parents and families are affected emotionally, socially and perhaps economically. The annual cost to the health-care system of caring for preterm infants to age seven is about $58 million. Additional services, such as educational resources or supplementary health, for children with a disability related to preterm birth add another $1.5 billion a year.
“One of the problems is we don’t have good animal models to investigate preterm births and that’s where we will start in this project,” Metz said.
Analyzing the factors affecting preterm birth in humans is a complicated affair since environment and lifestyles differ from person to person. But things can be more easily controlled in rats. Researchers can ensure they have the same food, the same housing and the same environment.
“Then we can start manipulating one or two factors at a time to see how they affect pregnancy and gestation,” Metz said.
She already has preliminary data from a pilot study that shows stress during pregnancy in rats can change gestation and set the time point of delivery. The stress the rat moms experienced was having to sit still for 20 minutes a day and having to swim for five minutes a day.
“I’m not saying swimming is bad for pregnant moms,” Metz said, adding the rat moms didn’t have control over when or how long they would swim.
Metz will start the research by stressing a group of 10 pregnant rats using the same method as in her pilot study. Blood tests will measure stress hormones and the data will be correlated with length of gestation. The pups, which could be as many as 100, will be studied for delays in skill development.
The end result will be an understanding of how environment and biology can affect rat moms and their pregnancies.
The Preterm Birth and Healthy Outcomes Team includes researchers with expertise in maternal and child health, clinicians and population health investigators from the University of Calgary, the Calgary Health Region and the University of Alberta. Their research will look at predicting preterm births, possible interventions and monitoring the long-term outcome in offspring.
The group plans to gather enough research evidence over the next five years to impact policy, practice and health care, reduce the number of preterm births and improve outcomes for preterm infants.
“If we can make a difference for a few babies I think that would make a great change because it affects their lifetime,” Metz said.
© Copyright by Lethbridge Herald.com
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