SweMaMi

Recruitment has now been closed. Find our first article and more information on our website.

Could your microbiome predict a healthy pregnancy and delivery?

The microbiome refers to the community of all bacteria, viruses and other micro-organisms residing at the different locations of your body, of which many are believed to have a beneficial effect on your health.

With this large project we would like to explore how the microbiome during pregnancy is related to pregnancy-related medical problems in expecting mothers and their babies, to hopefully be able to detect, prevent and treat these in the (near) future. Therefore, we would like your help and invite you to participate if:

• You are older than 18 years and you are before your 19th week of pregnancy
• You are residing in Sweden, and you have a personal identification number (”personnummer”) and postal address in Sweden (to send the home-sampling kits)
• You are sufficiently fluent in Swedish or English to complete our web-based questionnaires

Most pregnancies proceed without any major problems and lead to a normal delivery with healthy babies. Complications in the mother and child are uncommon but do occur, for example preterm birth (when the baby is born before 37 weeks) occurs in approximately 5% of all pregnancies. Yet, it is still hard to predict which women are at risk for complications. We therefore want to examine if the microbiome could be a way to measure health and predict possible pregnancy-related complications in expecting mothers and their children, for example pre-term birth.

Since we want to reach as many pregnant women as possible and plan to recruit and follow-up 2500 women all over Sweden, you can participate completely from home, without any need for medical check-ups or additional trips to your antenatal clinic or elsewhere.

We would like you to fill-in a web-based questionnaire (in English or Swedish) including among others, questions regarding your general health, your pregnancy, and dietary habits at three time points during your pregnancy: around week 17-19; around week 28-30, and 6-10 weeks after your expected delivery date. A few days after you have completed each questionnaire, you will receive an envelope at home including a self-sampling kit with instructions, so you can take the required samples yourself and send them back to our laboratory by mail with the enclosed pre-paid envelope (within one week after receiving the kit) for the analyses.

We would like you to collect samples at different body sites: your mouth (saliva), your vagina (soft swab), and your rectum (stool sample), which takes 5-10 minutes in total. At the last time-point, we will also ask you to collect a stool sample from your baby (from the diaper). So you will have to answer a questionnaire three times, and self-sample three times.

All sampling procedure are without any known health risk to your or your child, and are not painful but could lead to some minor and temporary discomfort

More information here (pdf)