Does Progesterone Treatment Prevent Preterm Birth?
This is off my usual beat, but a relative asked me to investigate progesterone treatment to prevent preterm birth. In her first pregnancy, membranes ruptured at 31 weeks and the baby was born a week later. (The baby was fine thanks to her mother taking good care of herself in pregnancy, steroids to mature her lungs, and her mother’s colostrum and breastmilk.) Pregnant for the second time, this woman had been told that progesterone injections would be given weekly beginning at 20 weeks to prevent a second occurrence. Being a member of my family, she wasn’t quite so willing as the average pregnant woman to automatically agree to this plan. I started with the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, the granddaddy of systematic review collections and a highly respected source. (A systematic review is a study of studies. Reviewers collect and analyze research on a specific issue using prespecified criteria. If the studies are sufficiently alike, statistical techniques can be used to pool t
