How to avoid premature births? [The RUT and pregnancy]

In Mexico up to 15% of pregnancies suffer from premature rupture of membranes 🤰💢👼 causing preterm labor.

Dr. Carlos Monsalve, an expert in prenatal care at Creafam, explains how the RUT or Routine Urine Test, in addition to being economical, allows us to identify various affectations, including infections that weaken the membranes. Have you done a RUT yet? Remember that #KnowledgeIsSuccess

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Unfortunately, we are used to going to the doctor until something is wrong, when something hurts us or bothers us too much, we go for a consultation, but true maternal-fetal care is about looking for and preventing any complication.

Fortunately, one of the cheapest tests can help us identify signs of many complications, it is the EGO or general urine test.

What is the Routine Urine Test or RUT for?

It is often thought that the urine test is only needed to find out if the mother is already pregnant or not, because through the levels of the human gonadotropin hormone, we can confirm the pregnancy.

But if it is done regularly during pregnancy we can suspect or confirm the presence of

  • Kidney diseases

  • Dehydration or poor diet

  • Principles of gestational diabetes

  • If we detect proteins in the blood, it is an alarm signal against preeclampsia.

  • Consumption of drugs and drugs.

  • But most important of all is detecting infections.

Why look for infections?

One in three women have some type of infection and they are usually asymptomatic, at least initially. And pregnant women are no exception. Urinary tract infection is the most frequent complication in pregnancy and one in 5 patients go to the consultation precisely because they already have symptoms of infection, which can be from the fact that the urine, instead of being light yellow, turns some other color, or that there is burning, difficulty urinating, detecting a little blood in the urine, or having a fever, low back pain, among others.

And the real problem is that if this infection is not treated in time, it can go up, either through the urinary tract and the kidneys or through the cervix and reach the placental membrane, then it begins to weaken it little by little and at the moment in which the infection manages to enter the amniotic fluid, the fetus becomes alert and activates its defense mechanisms to attack the infection, but at the same time the mother and the placenta generate their own defenses, all this comes together and generates contractions, an increase of pressure and the placental membrane, which was already weakened, breaks, generating premature labor.

At Creafam, making an EGO is fast, simple and cheap. Just remember that it must be done with the first urine in the morning, so be very careful when you wake up, do not go to the bathroom or you will have to wait another day to do it.

“If we analyze the amniotic fluid after a preterm birth, we will most likely find an infection, which could well have been avoided with a general urine test”

Dr. Carlos Monsalve
Dr. Carlos Monsalve
Specialist in gynecology and obstetrics
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