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The European Journal of Public Health 1996 6(3):159-165; doi:10.1093/eurpub/6.3.159
© 1996 by European Journal of Public Health
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ORIGINAL ARTICLES

Modulators of length of gestation

A study in Greece

ELENI PETRIDOU, DIMITRIOS TRICHOPOULOS, DONALD TONG, KATHARINE REVINTHI, ARTEMIS TSITSIKA, EUGENIA PAPATHOMA and DIONYSIOS ARAVANTINOS

Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, Athens University Medical School Athens, Greece
Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health Boston, USA
First Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Athens, Greece

Correspondence: Eleni Petridou, MD, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA, tel. +1 617 4324560, fax +1 617 5667805

In order to ascertain correlates of gestational age and predictors of prematurity, all the mothers delivered in 1993 at the maternity clinic of the First University Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and at one division of a private maternity hospital in Athens, Greece, were interviewed. From a total of 3,770 deliveries, those involving multiple pregnancies or Caesarean deliveries were excluded, as were pregnancies with an apparent duration of less than 150 or more than 300 days. The analysis was eventually based on 2,538 singleton deliveries. The duration of gestation was modelled as an outcome variable through multiple regression. The following factors were found to be significantly (p<0.05) related to the duration of gestation: maternal education, +0.8 day per 3 schooling years; family integrity, single compared to currently married mother, –3.7 days; parity, muttiparous (4+ births) compared to primiparae, +2.8 days; age at menarche, +1.8 days per 2 years; maternal age, +3.9 days for younger than 20 years and –1.7 days for older than 30 years in comparison to women 20–29 years old; maternal weight before pregnancy, +0.4 day per 5 kg; coffee drinking, +0.7 day per cup per day; tobacco smoking, –1.8 days per 0.5 pack per day. Bleeding during any trimester of pregnancy and maternal diabetes were significantly associated with shorter duration of gestation by 6.7 and 8.2 days respectively. The constellation of risk factors for a pre-term delivery in Greece appears similar to that in other populations. However, a positive association between coffee drinking and duration of pregnancy has not always been demonstrated in other studies and the longer duration of pregnancy among very young women represents an unusual finding. At the range of variation under investigation the individual factors are not powerful predictors but their combination could identify women at high risk for prematurity.

Keywords: gestational length, risk factors, coffee drinking, maternal age


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