14 DAY TRIAL // Jonhs Hopkins graduate students came up with a device that helps detect premature contractions up to six weeks ahead. It is a prototype ring made of medical grade biocompatible silicone elastomer, which has sensors that will pick up electrical signals from uterine contractions. This device in being tested in animals.
The National Center for Health Statistics says that about 500,000 premature births occur in the United States every year. In 2006, the situation was described by the Institute of Medicine as “a public health concern that costs society at least $26 billion a year.” Premature births not only cost a fortune, but are also causing serious health problems and neonatal deaths.
Normally, a pregnancy lasts 40 weeks. Babies born before the 37th week are considered premature. These high figures in preterm births are also caused by multiple births, by fertility treatments that usually trigger multiple births and to a higher number of women that have babies later in life.
To help solve this problem, Johns Hopkins graduate students and their faculty adviser have created a system that allows doctors to step in at an early stage and prevent premature births, thanks to a very early detection or labor signs.
Karin Hwang, one of the student inventors of Ontario, California, says: “The problem is, the technology now used by most doctors usually detects preterm labor when it’s so far along that medications can only delay some of these births for a few days. But if labor can be detected earlier, medications can sometimes prolong the pregnancy by as much as six weeks.”
Hwang was one of the four students that invented the system during a one-year master degree program. Along with Deepika Sagaram of Philadelphia, Rose Huang of Brooklyn, N.Y., Chris Courville of Lafayette, La. And their faculty sponsor, Abimbola Aina-Mumuney, an assistant professor of maternal fetal medicine in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, they have formed CervoCheck, a limited liability corporation, to help advance the project.
Even though the device has not yet been tested on humans, the students says its results are quite promising and that they are working on improving the system. The inventors of the CervoCheck hope that one day their invention could help save up to $44,000 per patient for every preterm birth prevented.