Among the many annoyances attached to being pregnant, morning sickness may very well rank the highest among them. Feeling sick throughout the day is no fun, and knowing that you are potentially looking at that for a few months is a nightmare, but all that misery might have a silver lining: it could mean good things for the baby.
In a recent study, a team of government researchers found that women who have nausea and vomiting earlier in their pregnancy were much less likely to have miscarriage - giving some credence to a common saying: morning sickness is a good thing.
"It's a common thought that nausea indicates a healthy pregnancy, but there wasn't a lot of high-quality evidence to support this belief," said Stefanie Hinkle, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, who led the study.
In the study, published in the American Medical Association's JAMA Internal Medicine, the researchers had a group of women who already had at least one miscarriage record nausea and vomiting symptoms in daily diaries from the second to the eighth week of their pregnancies. Once week 12 came, they would then report symptoms every month via questionnaires.
After two weeks, 17.8 percent of the women reported experiencing nausea without vomiting, while 2.7 percent said they had both symptoms.
From there, these reports came in an upward trend, with more reports of sickness coming in as the weeks progressed.
For example, 57.3 percent of the women experienced nausea without vomiting, while 26.6 percent experienced both symptoms by the eighth week, with those numbers increasing to 86 percent and 35 percent, respectively, by the 12th week.
By the end, only 23.6 percent of the pregnancies ended in another miscarriage, and through that, researchers were able to conclude two things: younger women (under the age of 25 in the case of this study) are more likely to experience nausea and vomiting during their pregnancy, and, more importantly, those who got morning sickness were 50 to 75 percent less likely to have another miscarriage.
"Among women with one or two prior pregnancy losses, nausea and vomiting were common very early in pregnancy and were associated with a reduced risk for pregnancy loss," Hinkle's team wrote in their report.
However, as is often the case with this type of research, the results left more questions than answers. While the team was able to see a clear connection between morning sickness and a successful pregnancy, they were unable to ascertain why this is actually the case.
Despite that, the findings still add to other pieces of evidence which links nausea and vomiting to a lower risk of miscarriage.
"Our findings should be reassuring to women experiencing these symptoms, as the risk for a pregnancy loss is greatly reduced in women with these symptoms," Hinkle said.
