Environmental impact on preterm birth

Preterm birth is a leading cause of neonatal morbidity and mortality and therefore one of the most important complications of pregnancy. Despite enormous effort put into research, it remains an enigma as how to prevent or to predict its occurrence. The current challenges in research involve the selection of women at risk for preterm birth and development of preventive interventions, ultimately prolonging pregnancy and thereby improving perinatal and neonatal outcome. In this thesis we aim to further unravel the aetiology of preterm birth by examining both external and internal environmental factors that influence the duration of pregnancy. Among external environmental factors we studied public health measures. The internal environmental factors we studied were fetal gender, maternal ethnicity and vaginal microbiota composition.