Sleep disorders linked with preterm birth in new UC San Francisco study

Pregnant women diagnosed with sleep disorders such as sleep apnea and insomnia may be at risk of delivering their babies before reaching full term, according to a UC San Francisco analysis of California births.

The study, published this week in Obstetrics & Gynecology, is reportedly the first to examine the effects of insomnia during pregnancy.

The researchers found that the prevalence of pre- term birth — delivery before 37 weeks’ gestation — was 14.6 percent for women diagnosed with a sleep disorder during pregnancy, compared to 10.9 percent for women who were not.

The odds of early preterm birth — before 34 weeks — was more than double for women with sleep apnea and nearly double for women with insomnia.

Complications are more severe among early preterm births, which the authors said makes this latter finding particularly important. So treating sleep dis- orders during pregnancy could be a way to reduce the preterm rate, which is about 10 percent in the United States, more than most other highly developed countries.

The researchers focused on 2,265 women with a sleep disorder diagnosis during pregnancy and compared them to the same number who didn’t have that diagnosis, but had identical maternal risk factors for preterm birth, such as a previous preterm birth, smoking during pregnancy, or hypertension.

“This gave us more con- fidence that our finding of an earlier delivery among women with disordered sleep was truly attributable to the sleep disorder, and not to other differences between women with and without these disorders,” said Jennifer Felder, lead author and a postdoctoral fellow in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry.

Felder said the significance of the study is that “sleep disorder is a potentially modifiable risk factor.”