Premature births linked to low cholesterol: study

Pregnant white women who have abnormally low cholesterol levels are 21 per cent more likely to give birth preterm, and both white and black women with low levels give birth to babies who weigh less than other infants of the same gestational age, researchers report.

Obstetricians already knew that women with the highest cholesterol levels are more likely to give birth preterm, but this is the first evidence of risk at the other end of the spectrum, experts said. “It appears that too little cholesterol may be as bad as too much cholesterol during pregnancy,” said Dr Max Muenke of the National Human Genome Research Institute, the lead author of Monday’s paper in the journal Pediatrics.

“At a practical level, this doesn’t mean that pregnant women need to start eating cholesterol,” said Dr Michael Katz , acting medical director of the March of Dimes Foundation, who was not involved in the study. “The big question in my mind is whether this is a surrogate for something else, especially since it is only true for white women. The physiology is not that different for whites and blacks.”