A national study led by the Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University in the Galilee found that among approximately 625,000 births in Israel Exposure to high and low temperatures during pregnancy is associated with low birth weight
Dr. Keren Agai-Shei, the leader of the study: "Lower birth weight may have increased the chance of morbidity in early childhood and throughout life. Our study found a relationship between exposure to high and low extrastructural temperature during pregnancy and lower birth weight in all babies born in Israel over a five-year period. In an era of climate change on the health system and we as a public must be prepared for this"
A national Israeli study led by Dr. Keren Agai-Shei from the Faculty of Medicine found consistent relationships between extremely high or low temperatures and low birth weight. The most dangerous factor is exposure to heat during the third trimester of pregnancy. The study is based on about 625 thousand live births of non-premature babies (birth after the 36th week of pregnancy) in Israel in the period 2014-2010.
The study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that during pregnancy there are critical time windows in which there is a higher sensitivity to exposure to low or high temperatures that affect the development of the fetus. The study was led by Dr. Keren Agai-Shi, director of the Health and Environmental Research Laboratory (HER) at the Faculty of Medicine at Bar-Ilan University, together with researchers from the Department of Geography and Environment of Bar-Ilan, Haifa University, Ben-Gurion University, the Israel Meteorological Service A study from Spain.
The research team used data from births that took place in Israel over five years, the residential address at the time of birth and an innovative climate model to determine the exposure to extra-structural temperature during pregnancy. According to the three main climate zones in Israel, a statistical analysis was performed comparing all the women who gave birth in each zone according to the average temperature during the weeks, trimesters and the entire period of pregnancy. The research findings showed consistent relationships between extremely high or low temperatures and the birth weight of the babies. The strongest associations between heat or cold exposure and low birth weight were observed during the third trimester of pregnancy.
Heat is more influential Source: Analysis of the relationships between average birth weight and region-specific temperature percentiles for all three climate zones showed that women exposed to the coldest or hottest temperatures had babies with a lower average birth weight than women exposed to relatively comfortable temperatures in the same region. Compared to women who were exposed to a comfortable temperature during pregnancy (50-40th percentiles), babies to women who were exposed to low temperature (below the 10th percentile) were born with an average weight 56 grams lower, and babies to women who were exposed to high temperature (above the 90th percentile) were born with an average weight lower by -65 grams.
When the probability of giving birth to a small baby (with a birth weight of less than 2,500 grams) was examined, it was found that for women who were exposed to low temperature (below the 10th percentile) the risk was 35% higher; And for women who were exposed to high temperature (over the 90th percentile) the risk was 58% higher.
