I have to admit, that even writing those words makes me snicker. While there is a study out this week on the length of human gestation or pregnancy varying - it seems like old news. We have often talked about due dates in terms of being the guesswork within certain parameters. This study does little to further what we already know. What they did do was to look at gestation length from the standpoint of ovulation.
So many times women do not know when they ovulated, therefore the practice of using the "average" of the first day of the last menstrual period (LMP) became fairly standard. In fact, while ovulation based prediction would be more accurate, even when women know this date, many doctors still go by the LMP. This study looked at just over 100 babies born to well educated, younger, women who had no problems getting pregnant and no health histories. This means that they study results may not be applicable to you. While I don't want to say the study doesn't offer much, it is a nice starting point for future research. I would love to see women be able to use information they gather from ovulation as a way to help predict when their baby will be born, it would give us better luck but also wider windows and hopefully less panic on the part of all involved.
What are your thoughts on the study or using ovulation to predict the due date?
Source:
Jukic, A.M., Baird, D.D., Weinberg, C.R., McConnaughey, D.R., & Wilcox, A.J. (2013). Length of human pregnancy and contributors to its natural variation. Human Reproduction. doi: 10.1093/humrep/det297
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Length of Pregnancy Can Vary originally appeared on About.com Pregnancy & Childbirth on Thursday, August 8th, 2013 at 01:19:19.
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