Women who receive one to one instruction on how to contract the pelvic floor muscles and practice pelvic floor muscle exercises with health professional supervision are less likely to suffer urine leakage during or after pregnancy. A systematic review from The Cochrane Library suggests that these exercises are effective for preventing and treating incontinence.

The US government's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has announced its first ever guidelines for physical activity for Americans that say adults should have 2.5 hours of moderate physical aerobic exercise a week, and children should have an hour or more of physical activity a day. The new HHS publication is titled "2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans"; it covers all ages, and it can be downloaded from the HHS website.

New research shows women who develop diabetes during pregnancy (gestational diabetes mellitus) have reduced levels of an insulin-sensitive hormone, adiponectin, as early as nine weeks into the pregnancy. The findings, published in the latest edition of Clinical Endocrinology, show early warning signs of gestational diabetes (GDM) are evident months before the clinical diagnosis is currently made (20-22 weeks).

US scientists have developed a non-invasive way to detect chromosomal disorders such as Down Syndrome in a fetus that only needs a sample of the pregnant woman's blood and therefore does not carry the risk of miscarriage of more invasive methods.

Infants born more than one week past their due dates have a higher risk of both impaired health and death, according to two new studies by authors from the University of California's San Francisco and Berkeley campuses. The studies compared more than 2.5 million normal-weight births from healthy pregnancies of 37 to 42 weeks gestation, the range that is considered to be full-term.

Pregnant women worried about their babies' genetic health face a tough decision: get prenatal gene testing and risk miscarriage, or skip the tests and miss the chance to learn of genetic defects before birth. But a new prenatal test could make this dilemma obsolete.

Pregnant women who are stressed, particularly late in pregnancy, have an increased risk of their child going on to develop asthma. So finds a British study conducted on a cohort of over 5,800 families and presented in Berlin at the Annual Congress of the European Respiratory Society (ERS). Very anxious pregnant women are 65% more likely to have a child who later develops asthma than mothers with a lower level of anxiety.

Using a fan while an infant is sleeping in a room with inadequate ventilation can decrease the risk of that infant dying of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), according to a report released on October 6, 2008 in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Sudden infant death syndrome, sometimes called cot death or crib death, describes the unexpected, unexplained death of an apparently health infant.

Despite national health experts' long-standing recommendation that women receive a flu shot while pregnant, three-quarters of women responding to a new national survey are unaware or unsure of these recommendations, and only 20 percent of those who are currently pregnant plan to get a flu shot this influenza season.