Having Morning Sickness Is Actually A Good Sign, Here's Why...

Morning sickness is one of the worst things that can happen when you are pregnant. No one would dare put their hand up to go through this horrible phase that comes with being pregnant. However, a new study revealed that morning sickness might be a great sign that the pregnancy is progressing smoothly.

According to CBS News, the new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that these symptoms dubbed as "morning sickness" may be related to a reduced risk of pregnancy loss. "Nausea and vomiting can take a toll on a woman's body, especially after the emotional time period of finding out you're pregnant," study author Stefanie N. Hinkle, Ph.D., a staff scientist at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told CBS News. "But our findings are really reassuring to women who are experiencing and suffering from these symptoms that their risk for pregnancy loss is greatly reduced. It's helping to tell them that they have a healthy pregnancy and that this is a good thing."

For the study, researchers followed around 800 women that discovered they were pregnant through urine tests. These participants were asked to keep track of their nausea and vomiting symptoms in pregnancy diaries and questionnaires. Towards the end of the study, there were about 24 percent or 188 pregnancies ended in a miscarriage.

However, Science Alert reported that the researchers found that women who had nausea symptom by the 8th week had a 50 percent (57.3 percent of the group) chance of experiencing a miscarriage, compared to those who didn't have nausea. Also, researchers found that in women who had both nausea and vomiting symptoms by the 8th week (which consists of 26.6 percent of the total participants) were 75 percent less likely to undergo a miscarriage than those who didn't experience having both symptoms.

Other studies had shown the opposite, but they did not have data on the very earliest of pregnancies or used a woman's memory of events to back up their claims. "Thus, in the absence of prospective data, nausea and vomiting may be no more than a sign of still being pregnant as opposed to a sign of the health of the pregnancy," Hinkle's team wrote in their report.

Meanwhile, the team also said that they didn't find anything that might point to the cause of why a miscarriage happened or that might cause nausea and vomiting, aside from being pregnant and the change in the level of hormones. NBC News also reported that the only consistent pattern revealed that women under 25 had a higher chance of having morning sickness than older women.

"Our modeling strategy accounted for smoking, alcohol and caffeine intake, and stress at each week, suggesting that the mechanism is likely not through avoidance of such substances," Hinkle's team wrote.