Did you know that chlamydia causes infertility?

How Does Chlamydia Affect Birth Outcomes?

In a study, three birth outcomes, i.e. still birth where the baby died in the womb after 20 weeks of gestation, unplanned preterm birth where the woman went into labor and gave birth before 37 weeks gestation and babies underweight where they are in the lowest 10% of birth weight by gestation and sex have been used to answer this question, does chlamydia affect birth outcome.

However, the analysis was based on whether the mother had been tested before, during or after pregnancy.

Scope of the Study

The research done on women above 15 years  showed that out of 101558 women included in the study, 3.9%,9.6% and 0.7% had unplanned preterm birth, an underweight birth, and still born respectively. Among these women 18.9% had received testing before pregnancy, 20.9% received the testing during the pregnancy while 60.2% did not receive any testing at all. However, regardless of the Chlamydia infection testing, the women tested before pregnancy had a higher risk to preterm births and stillbirth cases but a lower risk of having an underweight baby.

Among 4.1% those tested for Chlamydia infection to be negative before pregnancy had a spontaneous occurrence of the preterm births and so to the 5.5 % of the women tested to be positive for Chlamydia infection before pregnancy. This was also evident in 4.5% of the women who had tested negative during pregnancy and 6.2% of the women who tested positive for this infection during pregnancy.

Study Findings

The study results associated the birth of an underweight baby to the positive Chlamydia tests results during the pregnancy. However, according to the test results there was no link found to be the cause of still births based on the Chlamydia infection status. There was no enough data to show the relationship based on when the mother was tested. It was also identified that among the Caucasians, who had low incomes, had a higher likelihood for stillbirths, preterm birth or underweight baby regardless of the Chlamydia status or testing time.

Therefore, it can be concluded that the increased effects on the negative birth outcomes does not greatly increase with Chlamydia infection before or during pregnancy. This calls for more research to identify the other causes apart from the Chlamydia status.