Only 5 percent of women deliver on their estimated due dates, according to The Huffington Post.
This small percentage may increase in the future as a new study published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology reports that measuring the length of a woman’s cervix with an ultrasound could help make the prediction more accurate, according to TIME.
For the study, researchers reportedly analyzed five prospective studies that included 735 women with single-child pregnancies who had babies in the head-down position. Transvaginal ultrasound cervical length was reportedly used to predict the due date of the women involved in the studies.
Researchers reportedly found that when a woman’s cervix was more than 30 mm at her due date, she had less than a 50% chance of delivering within a week. When the cervix was 10 mm or less, there was reportedly more than a 85% chance of the woman delivering within a week.
“We doctors, nurses and midwives always see these patients [who are at or post-term], and they're big, they're uncomfortable, and they want to know when they're going to deliver. And I've always felt we look like stooges, because we have no idea," stated study author Dr. Vincenzo Berghella, director of Maternal Fetal Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
“Finally, this data seems to put an end to it.”
The recent study was met with open arms as the new guidelines released last year for estimating women’s due dates were reportedly very much the same as previous rules.
“The ability of ultrasound to detect abnormalities, and to accurately measure a baby has greatly improved with time," said Dr. Sindhu Srinivas, director of obstetrics at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
“But it's true that our ability to predict an individual's delivery date beyond the estimated due date has not significantly improved, largely because the triggers for labor and what makes a woman go into labor are not fully understood."
Not everyone agrees with the potential new method.
“I do not agree with the need, nor utility, nor benefit of performing transvaginal ultrasounds at full-term to predict onset of labor,” Fahimeh Sasan, an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who was not involved in the study, said in an email to TIME.
“Measuring a cervical length with transvaginal ultrasound between 37-39 weeks can be quite difficult because the cervix is not fully [or] optimally visible in all pregnancies via ultrasound at this gestation, hence making measurement not very reliable nor reproducible.”