Importance of Nutrition and Fetal Development in Pregnancy

This report examines the crucial role of nutrition during pregnancy, highlighting its direct impact on fetal development and the overall health of both the mother and the child. It emphasizes the importance of adequate nutritional intake before and during pregnancy to prevent complications such as low birth weight, which can lead to various health issues including insulin-independent diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, and cardiovascular diseases. The report also discusses the significance of folic acid in preventing neural tube defects and the role of antioxidant vitamins in managing pregnancy hypertension. Additionally, it touches upon the importance of monitoring fetal heart rate using techniques like the Doppler method and during the labor stages.

Running head: IMPORTANCE OF NUTRITION
Importance of Nutrition
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IMPORTANCE OF NUTRITION
Discussion
Maternal nutrition before and during the period of pregnancy is very crucial as it is
directly associated with the foetal development and along with this, the physical health of the
new born child is also associated with the nutritional wellbeing of the pregnant woman during
the period of pregnancy. Due to lack of adequate nutritional intake of the pregnant woman
before and during the pregnancy period, can cause low birth weight of the new born due to
the maternal underweight (Darnton-Hill & Mkparu, 2015). According to the study of
Kajantie and Hovi (2014), it is reported that, there is a higher risks of having various disease
such as insulin-independent diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, arterial hypertension and
ischaemic heart disease among the child with lower birth weight than that of the child with
normal birth weight. According to the study of Scolamiero et al. (2014), it is reported that,
due to deficiency in the folic acid intake during the pregnancy, there may be cases of neural
tube defect among the children of mother having malnutrition during their pregnancy. Not
only for the children, but for the mothers the nutritional foods are required in order to prevent
the pregnancy hypertension as antioxidant vitamins are capable preventing this condition.
Feedback
As per the discussion, it is very true that, the monitoring of the foetal heart rate is very
crucial for the health condition of the children. However, the mentioned FHR of the baby is
very subjective that is the FHR is based on the age of the new born. However, the chosen
auscultation method through Doppler technique in the FHR process is quite effective (Gupta,
Sharma & Joshi, 2016). During the first stage of the labour, auscultation is performed in
every 15 minutes interval that is effective for the continuous and effective measuring of the
FHR (Signorini, Fanelli & Magenes, 2014).

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IMPORTANCE OF NUTRITION
References
Darnton-Hill, I., & Mkparu, U. (2015). Micronutrients in pregnancy in low-and middle-
income countries. Nutrients, 7(3), 1744-1768.
Gupta, P., Sharma, K. K., & Joshi, S. D. (2016). Fetal heart rate extraction from abdominal
electrocardiograms through multivariate empirical mode decomposition. Computers in
biology and medicine, 68, 121-136.
Kajantie, E., & Hovi, P. (2014). Is very preterm birth a risk factor for adult cardiometabolic
disease?. In Seminars in Fetal and Neonatal Medicine (Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 112-117). WB
Saunders.
Scolamiero, E., Villani, G. R. D., Ingenito, L., Pecce, R., Albano, L., Caterino, M., ... &
Ruoppolo, M. (2014). Maternal vitamin B12 deficiency detected in expanded newborn
screening. Clinical biochemistry, 47(18), 312-317.
Signorini, M. G., Fanelli, A., & Magenes, G. (2014). Monitoring fetal heart rate during
pregnancy: contributions from advanced signal processing and wearable
technology. Computational and mathematical methods in medicine, 2014.