Is There A Link Between Oversleeping And Stillbirths?

It can be difficult to sleep while pregnant. Any number of issues can interrupt sleep, including the frequent need to urinate, back pain, abdominal discomfort and shortness of breath, among others. Moreover, disruptive sleep during pregnancy can be risky for the fetus, contributing to curbing growth. But a recent study suggests that excessive, undisturbed sleep may be a problem, too.

Sleeping continuously for nine or more hours may be related to the danger of late stillbirth, that is, the loss or death of a baby before or during delivery.

"There's been a lot of public attention paid to sleep deprivation and its impact on health, but not as much to lengthy - perhaps too much - sleep, especially when it comes to pregnancy," said Louise O'Brien, research associate professor in the neurology sleep disorders center and in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan. "Women often worry when they wake up several times during the night when they are pregnant, but it may be protective in this case."

O'Brien and her colleagues analyzed online surveys from 153 women who had experienced a late stillbirth (on or after 28 weeks of pregnancy) during the month previous to answering the questionnaire and 480 women with an ongoing third-trimester pregnancy or who had recently delivered a live born baby during the same period. The findings, recently published in the journal Birth, suggest a connection between long periods of undisturbed maternal sleep and stillbirth, independent of other risk factors.

Stillbirth affects about 1 percent of all pregnancies, or about 24,000 annually in the United States, many of them unexplained, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

O'Brien said that both the women with stillborn babies and the women with live-born babies reported a similar proportion of long sleep before they were pregnant, which was 10 percent in both groups.

But nearly 30 percent of those who had stillbirths reported long sleep in the last month of pregnancy compared with only 16 percent of women with live-born babies.

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