Certain conditions put your pregnancy at risk, but these are not common and are not necessarily a reflection of your age. Many of these can’t be avoided, but you can learn how to cope with them.

Influence Of Age

As you enter in to the late second and third trimesters of pregnancy, your age will playa factor in your pregnancy in a few key areas, placing you at (slightly) higher risk of complications. The three most common age related complications in later pregnancy are preeclampsia (toxemia), gestational diabetes, and multiple gestations (twins or triplets). Some pregnancy complications are less likely to be related to your age for example, preterm labor and cervical incompetence or insufficiency (in ,which the cervix opens too early.)

Reducing Risk

In general, there is not much you can do during your pregnancy to reduce the rate of these problems. Your risk of preeclampsia, which :s characterized by blood pressure and kidney problems, is closely related to your blood pressure at conception. The lower your blood pressure prior to pregnancy and early in your pregnancy, the less chance that you will develop this condition. Gestational diabetes tends to run in families.

Both high blood pressure and gestational diabetes are more common in women whose weight is higher than their ideal body weight at conception, the risks increase as this baseline weight increases. Maintaining a healthy weight before you conceive will greatly reduce your chances of pregnancy complications, but not eliminate them completely. Multiple pregnancies are also more common in older women, in part because of the increased use of assisted reproductive technologies. Women carrying twins and triplets are more likely to develop both preeclampsia and gestational diabetes. They are also more likely to go into labor early. While this list of possible problems sounds daunting, it is important to realize that most older women will not develop all, or even any, of them.