Family Physician: A Friend to Depend On

Posted on: 29 July 2015

Your teenage daughter is pregnant and life as you know it has changed completely. This pregnancy is automatically considered to be high-risk because your daughter's body has not finished growing to adulthood. Follow these tips to improve the odds of a healthy outcome for both your daughter and the baby.

Find a Specialized Obstetrician

You need to find a doctor that specializes in high-risk pregnancies. She will have the knowledge and skill to help your daughter through these 40 weeks. The specialized obstetrician knows the common problems and ailments associated with teen pregnancies. You may think that thousands of women give birth every day, so you daughter should be fine with any doctor, but your daughter is not a woman, she is still an adolescent.

Keeping Regular Appointments is Necessary

You may think back to your own pregnancies and feel like the doctor's appointments were a waste of time. After all, all that usually happened included you peeing in a cup, getting weighed, measuring your belly, and checking your blood pressure. You, or your daughter, may think that it is okay to skip out on these appointments.

Don't do it. While these measurements may seem small to you, they give the doctor a lot of information.

Why the Urine Test is Important

The urine sample tells the doctor the amount of sugar, protein, and ketones in the urine. If there is regularly too much sugar in the urine,  the obstetrician will want to test your daughter for gestational diabetes.

Too much protein during the early months of pregnancy could mean a urinary tract infection or kidney damage. Later in pregnancy it is a warning sign for preeclampsia, which can be fatal to both mom and baby.

Ketones in the urine show the doctor that the mother is not getting enough carbohydrates and nutrients. The doctor can ask you about how you are eating, but the urine test gives them a scientific understanding.

Weight and Uterus Size

One of the main problems that many teen mothers have is not eating enough and not eating well enough. The doctor will weigh your daughter at each appointment to make sure that she is gaining enough weight. If she does not, then the baby is at high risk for low birth weight, preterm labor, and stillbirth.

The doctor or nurse measures from the pubic bone to the top of the uterus to get the fundal height. The obstetrician will know that everything is progressing well if the fundal height in centimeters closely matches the number of weeks the patient is gestationally. Thus if your daughter is 22 weeks pregnant, then the fundal height should be 22 centimeters. 

For more information on high-risk pregnancies, contact a professional like those at Triad OB-GYN PC.