Hospital emergency rooms, hallways, and even children’s hospitals around the world were flooded with coronavirus patients as the pandemic engulfed much of the world this year.
But doctors at various hospitals around the world noted that one room in their facilities was visibly silent: the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
Generally busy with medical staff caring for small premature babies, doctors in Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United States, and Australia noted an unusual decrease in the number of babies born prematurely.
Now, two studies have quantified calm in premature babies born in recent months. An Irish study found that about 75 percent fewer premature babies were born in 2020 than the year before.
During a month of confinement in Denmark, the number of premature babies born decreased by almost 90 percent, according to the researchers.
Both documents have yet to be reviewed for publication, but it’s also a trend seen by American doctors.
Why some babies are born premature remains largely a medical mystery, and scientists hope that studying the unusual patterns seen during coronavirus blocks can shed light on whether being home or other factors could have led to fewer premature births. .
Doctors in both Ireland and Denmark noted that their NICUs were unusually empty of very premature babies during blockages. Peer-reviewed studies revealed that the number of babies who weighed 3.3 pounds or less and who were born prematurely decreased by 75 to 90% in their countries.
The most notable difference between this year and previous years, in the Irish study, for which a preprint was published on MedRxiv.org, was for very low birth weight babies.
These are babies born weighing 3.3 lbs. Or less.
For more than the past decade, from January 2001 to April 2019, approximately 8.8 out of every 1,000 live babies born in Ireland were very premature.
Between January and April 2020, just 2.17 out of every 1,000 babies born were delivered prematurely, according to pre-review research by University Maternity Hospital Limerick.
That rate was almost four times less than the typical number of premature babies born in the country.
The researchers called it an “unprecedented reduction” in the rate of preterm or very premature births.
Meanwhile, Danish doctors at the Statens Serum Institut noticed an equally silent NICU and began doing their own research to quantify the pattern.
The rate of very premature births in Denmark during the March and April blockades was 90 percent lower than the rate of 2.19 very premature births per 1,000 babies born there over the past five years, a rate that has remained stable, until now.
Like the Irish study, the researchers noted that much of this decline was in babies born extremely early.
Each research team offered a handful of possible explanations. Both suggested that with more people staying home, air quality has improved. Studies suggest that air pollution may be the cause of up to 18 percent of preterm births.
Stress is also a frequently cited but difficult to pinpoint potential risk factor for preterm labor.
Although the pandemic itself has been stressful, for pregnant women who were forced to stay home during confinements, the net effect of cutting off their commuting and anxieties in the workplace may have been less stressful.
The ban on non-essential medical procedures and general hesitation to go to hospitals may also have reduced the number of women who were induced to give birth early due to high blood pressure or other complications that could be mild or dangerous, depending on the pregnancy.
It is still unclear by any stretch of the imagination why these higher-risk births have declined amidst blockages, but the authors of both studies are sure worth exploring.
“Our observations, if reflected in other countries that adopted COVID-19-driven blocking measures, would redefine the antecedents that trigger the still little-known pathways leading to premature births,” the Irish authors wrote.
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