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Health: Sleep position may affect stillbirth risk Women who do not sleep on their left side on their last night of pregnancy have double the risk of late stillbirth compared with women who do sleep on their left side
The researchers who conducted the study said women should not worry because the increased risk is still very small -- the chance of the baby being stillborn rises to 3.93 per 1,000 for those who don't sleep on their left from 1.96 per 1,000 for those who do. A significant link was also found between sleeping regularly during the day, or sleeping longer than average at night, and late stillbirth risk, the researchers said. Tomasina Stacey of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Auckland, whose study was published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), suggested that restricted blood flow to the baby when the mother lies on her back or right side for long periods may explain the link. A series of studies led by researchers from the World Health Organization and published earlier this year found that more than 2.6 million pregnancies a year end in stillbirth, many of them among women in poor countries. This means that every day more than 7,200 babies are stillborn.
