A study of more than 2.5 million pregnant women in California found that those who were exposed to wildfire smoke for at least one day had a greater risk of delivering the child prematurely. The findings, which are still subject to peer review, were announced on Saturday at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine’s annual meeting.
They will be published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
The researchers first gathered information from hospital records of expectant mothers from 2007 to 2012 in order to gauge the daily levels of wildfire smoke in the participants’ ZIP codes during their pregnancies.
The results suggested that just one day of exposure to smoke moderately raised the risk of spontaneous preterm birth, medically defined as before the 37th week of pregnancy.
‘Most pregnant persons are having well over one day of exposure, and the chronicity of this exposure, which continues to increase, is really the worrisome relationship with wildfire smoke,’ said Dr Anne Waldrop, the study’s lead author and a maternal-fetal medicine fellow at Stanford University told NBC news.
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