ST. LOUIS, May 15 (UPI) -- Labor can be longer for pregnant women who are obese, according to Missouri researchers.
The research, presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, finds that it takes obese pregnant women who are given medication to induce labor longer to deliver their babies than women of normal body weight.
The obese women also needed more medication -- a dinoprostone vaginal insert -- to activate labor, and it took longer for the medicine to start working, the study of 195 women found. The obese women also are more likely to have a Caesarean deliver than a vaginal delivery.
Doctors need to tell obese women that electing to have labor induced can place them at higher risk of longer labor and could increase the possibility that they will need a Caesarean section, and doctors may want to wait for labor to begin spontaneously rather than choosing to induce labor early in obese women, given these risks, according to study leader Dr. Erin Brousseau.
