THURSDAY, April 22, 2004 (HealthDayNews) -- Small uterine fibroids may increase the risk of miscarriage, according to early findings from a study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Fibroids are benign muscle tumors of the uterus. It's estimated they affect more than one in five women of reproductive age.
Fibroids were diagnosed in 170 of the 1,600 women taking part in this pilot study. The early results indicate that women with fibroids have a 55 percent increased risk of pregnancy loss. Smaller fibroids are significantly more associated with miscarriage than larger fibroids.
It also appears the presence of fibroids is uniformly associated with miscarriage throughout early pregnancy.
Even though fibroids are common, little is known about the influence they have on pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriage, fetal growth restriction and premature birth.
"No studies have prospectively investigated these risks in a large cohort of women early in pregnancy where presence of fibroids was uniformly assessed using ultrasound imaging. This is the first large-scale prospective study to do that," principal investigator Katherine Hartmann, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology and of epidemiology, said in a prepared statement.
She presented the pilot study recently at the annual meeting of the Society for Gynecologic Investigation in Houston.
Over the next five years, she and her team will enroll an additional 3,300 women in their research.
More information
The National Uterine Fibroids Foundation has more about uterine fibroids.
