By Our Staff Reporter
Dehradun, 20 Nov: A webinar was organised by Gynaecologist and Obstetrician Dr Sujata Sanjay of Sanjay Orthopaedic, Spine and Maternity Centre, Jakhan. During this webinar, Dr Sujata provided information about anaemia during pregnancy. More than 145 medical and nursing students and adolescent girls from Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab participated in this public awareness lecture.
Dr Sanjay revealed during the webinar that deficiency of iron elements in the human body is the main cause of anaemia. Mostly women and children suffer from this. It can affect in any season and ignoring this disease may be dangerous. It is common in pregnant woman to suffer from premature labour pain due to blood loss during pregnancy. Due to lack of blood, the baby is born underweight and weak and sometimes due to lack of blood the mother and child also die during delivery. To ensure that mother and child remain healthy, women need more iron, vitamins and minerals during pregnancy. Lack of nutrients in food makes women anaemic. The amount of haemoglobin in a healthy woman should be 12 grams.
“Woman’s blood changes during the course of a pregnancy in response to the demands of the growing fetus. The volume of the plasma increases gradually but certainly, expanding by 40 to 50 percent, so that at the end of the pregnancy there is almost a litre more blood in circulation than at the beginning. At the same time, the mass of red blood cells increases about 25 percent. Since anaemia is measured by calculating the amount of haemoglobin (incorporated with the red blood cells) to the amount of blood volume, the value drops because of these changes,” added Dr Sujata.
In anaemia, haemoglobin drops below 10 milligrams per cubic centimetre and this can happen in some pregnant patients, although they have more circulating red blood cells during pregnancy than at other times. The term “physiologic” anaemia of pregnancy is often used to describe the condition.
Additional iron also is needed for foetus growth. During the course of a pregnancy, an additional 800-plus milligrams of iron are needed, a quantity that is difficult to get from diet alone. That is why iron supplements are routinely prescribed for pregnant women. The iron may be contained in ferrous sulphate or ferrous gluconate, which may be included in a general vitamin supplement or taken as a separate pill or capsule. Iron also aids the functioning of a protein called thyroid peroxidase (TPO), which is crucial for the production of thyroid hormone. Pregnant women need to produce enough thyroid hormone in order for their babies’ brains to fully develop. This is particularly important in the first trimester of pregnancy, when the fetus has yet to develop its own thyroid gland, added Dr Sujata.
Women are at increased risk because of higher rates of dietary iron deficiency, inherited blood disorders, nutrient deficiencies and infections such as malaria, HIV and hookworm. Anaemic pregnant women are twice as likely to die during or shortly after pregnancy than those without the blood condition, according to an international study.
“Anaemia in pregnancy is one of the most common medical problems pregnant women encounter both in low- and high-income countries,” Dr Sujata stated in her seminar. “If a woman develops severe anaemia at any point in her pregnancy or in the seven days after delivery, she is at a higher risk of dying, making urgent treatment even more important.”
Improved access to antenatal care in remote areas, hookworm treatment and access to transfusion services are among the recommendations to reduce anaemia and pregnant women’s death risk from it. If there is a condition provoking a “true” anaemia, it must be remedied to ensure a healthy pregnancy.