
WEDNESDAY, April 8, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- The makeup of bacteria in an expectant mother's vagina may help identify which women are most at risk of giving birth prematurely, a new study suggests.
It also found that pregnant women who deliver early are more likely to have a diverse community of vaginal bacteria.
The findings, based on more than 3,000 samples taken from more than 400 women, were recently published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.
"We found that women who deliver prematurely have a significantly more diverse vaginal microbiome, especially in their first trimester, than those who deliver at full term," said study co-author Marina Sirota, an assistant professor at the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at the University of California, San...