Is There a Relationship between Complications of Early Pregnancy and Biometeorological Forecast?

Abstract

The aim of our study was to connect the possible complications of early pregnancy (miscarriage and symptomatic ectopic pregnancy) up to the 12th week of gestation with biometeorological conditions while assuming a greater number of incidents with an unfavorable biometeorological forecast. We performed a retrospective observational study using medical data of a single medical center of Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, Sveti Duh University Hospital and meteorological data from the Croatian Meteorological and Hydrometeorological Service in Zagreb. We tracked the number of visits to the gynecology and obstetrics emergency unit on a daily basis during 2017. Days with five or more visits were selected and underwent further analysis, during which the number of miscarriages and symptomatic ectopic pregnancies was noted. The information from the biometeorological forecast was then extracted and added to the database. Our results did not show a statistically significant difference between the groups determined by biometeorological forecast in the number of spontaneous abortions or ectopic pregnancy. Also, statistically significant results did not follow the expected trend of the increasing number of complications related to worse biometeorological forecast, or vice versa, a decreased number of complications with better forecast. Our single-center retrospective analysis of emergency unit visits related to weather conditions did not show a connection between the complications of early pregnancy and biometeorological conditions. However, different results could emerge in future studies. Considering the large and high-quality database collected for this study, efforts in researching the connection between other gynecologic pathologies and weather conditions will be feasible.

Keywords

• Biometeorology
• Early pregnancy
• Ectopic pregnancy
• Meteorology
• Spontaneous abortion