Preconception Care and Prenatal Care: For Researchers and Health Care Providers

At these links, you can find information about NICHD-sponsored research networks, studies, and projects related to prenatal care:

• The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists
  • Smoking Cessation during Pregnancy: Clinician’s Guide (PDF - 4.53 MB)
    This document provides suggestions, sample dialogues, and resources for health care providers to help their patients quit smoking.
  • The Importance of Preconception Care in the Continuum of Women’s Health
    This document reinforces the importance of preconception care and the need for a plan for your reproductive life.
• A Report of the CDC/ATSDR Preconception Care Work Group and the Select Panel on Preconception Care (2006)
  This report provides recommendations to improve both preconception health and care. The goal of these recommendations is to improve the health of women and couples before they conceive a first or subsequent pregnancy.
• Birth Defects Research Group
  The Birth Defects Research Group is a multicenter, multidisciplinary group led by the NICHD to investigate the etiology of birth defects, particularly neural tube defects. It is supported by the NICHD’s Division of Epidemiology, Statistics & Prevention Research. The collaborating institutions are the NICHD, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the Health Research Board of Ireland, and the Department of Biochemistry, Trinity College, Dublin.
• Maternal-Fetal Surgery Network
  The Maternal-Fetal Surgery Network was created in 2001 to investigate surgical treatment for spina bifida, specifically in utero surgery compared with postnatal surgery for myelomeningocele. The NICHD Pregnancy & Perinatology Branch supports the network.
• The Reproductive Medicine Network, part of the NICHD Fertility and Infertility (FI) Branch, leads several current clinical trials to determine if medications for women with polycystic ovary syndrome can help them conceive and deliver a healthy infant.
• The Obstetric-Fetal Pharmacology Research Unit (OPRU) Network, part of the Obstetric & Pediatric Pharmacology Branch, provides the expert infrastructure needed to test therapeutic drugs during pregnancy. It allows researchers to conduct safe, technically sophisticated, and complex studies that will help clinicians protect women’s health, improve birth outcomes, and reduce infant mortality. The mission of the OPRU is to promote and facilitate cooperative multidisciplinary research to enhance the understanding of obstetric pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics.
• NIH Consensus Development Conference: Diagnosing Gestational Diabetes Mellitus
  At this conference, scheduled for October 29 to 31, 2012, an unbiased, independent panel will evaluate scientific data and prepare a consensus statement addressing key questions. The statement will be widely disseminated to practitioners, policy makers, patients, researchers, the general public, and the media.

Please note: Links to organizations and information included on this page do not indicate endorsement from the NICHD, NIH, or HHS.