A study funded by the National Institutes of Health suggests that pregnant women who have trouble breathing while they sleep – like snoring or having difficulty breathing – may have babies who are more likely to experience complications after they’re born. These complications could include jaundice, low blood sugar, seizures, or even death. The researchers are calling for more studies to see if treating these breathing problems during pregnancy can help improve baby outcomes.

The study was done by Dr. Arlin Delgado and his colleagues at the University of South Florida, along with other academic centers across the U.S. It was published in the American Journal of Perinatology and was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Now, let’s dive into some background. About 11 to 20% of pregnant women experience sleep-disordered breathing, which is when they have trouble breathing while they sleep. The most common type is called obstructive sleep apnea, which happens when the airway gets blocked multiple times during sleep. In pregnancy, sleep-disordered breathing has been linked to a higher risk of gestational diabetes and high blood pressure disorders.

There haven’t been many studies on how sleep-disordered breathing affects newborns, and the ones that have been done have had inconsistent results. For this study, the researchers looked at data from about 2,100 pregnant women who were part of a larger study. They wore sleep monitors at home on two different occasions – once in early pregnancy (between 6 to 12 weeks) and again in mid-pregnancy (between 22 to 31 weeks).

The researchers considered the mothers to have sleep-disordered breathing if they had five or more instances of slowed or stopped breathing during either night. They classified the babies as experiencing complications if they had certain conditions like respiratory distress syndrome, rapid breathing, needing help with breathing, jaundice, low blood sugar, being larger than expected for their age, seizures, sepsis (which is inflammation caused by an infection), or if they died.

So, here are the results: About 3% of the women had sleep-disordered breathing in early pregnancy, and 5.7% developed it in mid-pregnancy. Complications happened in 29.3% of babies in the early pregnancy group, 30.3% of babies in the mid-pregnancy group, and 17.8% of babies in the group of women without sleep-disordered breathing.

But here’s the interesting part – when the researchers took into account factors like high blood pressure, pregestational diabetes, and obesity that are associated with sleep-disordered breathing, they found that babies of mothers in the early pregnancy group didn’t have a higher risk of complications than babies of mothers without sleep-disordered breathing. However, babies of mothers in the mid-pregnancy group had a 42% higher risk of complications compared to babies of mothers without sleep-disordered breathing.

This study shows that if pregnant women develop sleeping breathing problems in the middle of their pregnancy, their babies are more likely to have complications after they’re born. The researchers think that knowing this information can help doctors guide and counsel their patients better. They also say that more research is needed to understand why women develop sleep-disordered breathing during mid-pregnancy and if treating it can make a difference in the outcomes for babies.