Food festival puts health centrestage

HEALTH BRIEFING:HEALTHY EATING is a major theme at this year's Waterford Festival of Food, which takes place in Dungarvan, April 12th-15th.

The festival has brought the Nutrition Health Foundation (NHF) on board to host a day of free nutrition workshops on Friday, April 13th, featuring dietitians and healthy lifestyle role models. Speakers at the workshops include former RTÉ broadcaster Míchael O’Muircheartaigh, who will be sharing his tips for a long and healthy life.

See waterfordfestivaloffood.com.

Call for pregnant women for diabetes trial at NUIG

WANTED: pregnant women for a new clinical trial led by NUI Galway (NUIG) which aims to develop effective measures to prevent Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM).

The research, part of a pan-European project, is being spearheaded by NUIG medicine school head and consultant endocrinologist Prof Fidelma Dunne.

Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM) is a type of diabetes which can be first diagnosed during pregnancy, and is more common in women who are overweight or obese. Possible complications associated with the condition can include delivery of oversized babies, birth trauma and even intra-uterine death. Neonatal abnormalities can also occur, including low blood sugar, difficulty breathing and jaundice. The maternal risks include a greater risk of Caesarean, pregnancy-induced hypertension and pre-eclampsia.

NUIG explains that participants will “randomly receive either vitamin D or a specific diet or lifestyle intervention, including physical activity by a lifestyle coach or a combination of diet and physical activity”. The trial has been designed to establish whether any or all of these interventions prevent GDM.

Vitamin D deficiency has been found to be more common in overweight and obese women and is associated with insulin resistance, a precursor of GDM.

Women who are less than 12 weeks pregnant, are overweight, and who plan to give birth at Galway University Hospitals are invited to participate. Potential volunteers can contact Prof Dunne or Veronica McInerney, NUIG Clinical Research Facility clinical manager on tel (091) 495964.

Labour longer for modern mothers, study shows

MANY TASKS can be tackled more quickly now than 50 years ago, but it seems that delivering a baby naturally is not one of them, according to a US government study. Compared with the 1960s, women have in recent years spent two to three hours longer in labour, according to researchers at the US National Institutes of Health. The extra time is spent in the first stage of labour – the longest part of the process, before the “pushing” stage, according to findings published in the American Journal of Obstetrics Gynaecology.

Mothers are now older and weigh more, and their newborns are bigger too. “But even when we take these changing demographics into account, labour is still longer,” said lead researcher Katherine Laughon, at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Though Ms Laughon said the study wasn’t able to fully address the potential reasons for the difference, one partial explanation may be epidural pain relief, which is far more common now than 50 years ago. Epidurals are known to slow labour down by about 40-90 minutes.

The findings were based on two US government studies done decades apart. One, between 1959 and 1966, included about 39,500 women who delivered a full-term baby, while the other tracked more than 98,000 women who had a full-term baby between 2002 and 2008. All of the women had a spontaneous labour, that is, not induced.

When it came to length of labour, first-time mothers in recent years typically spent 2.6 hours longer in the first stage, compared with their counterparts in the 1960s. The difference dropped to two hours with women who had given birth before.