ArticleBMC pregnancy and childbirth2023
Cross-sectional study of the proportion of antibiotic use during childbirth in full-term deliveries in Finland.
Article in BMC pregnancy and childbirth, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- Investigating prenatal and perinatal factors on meconium microbiota: a systematic review and cohort study.Pediatric research · 2024Pooled it
- Intrapartum and postpartum antibiotic use in seven low- and middle-income countries: Findings from the A-PLUS trial.BJOG : an international journal of obstetrics and gynaecology · 2025Trial
- Perinatal ampicillin exposure alters murine maternal fecal bile acid and acylcarnitine profiles.Gut microbes · 2026Article
- Early-life antibiotic exposure and the risk of overweight and obesity in children.Pediatric research · 2026Article
- Changes in Healthy Infant Gut Microbiota over the Past Decades.Neonatology · 2026Article
- Influence of perinatal ampicillin exposure on maternal fecal microbial and metabolic profiles.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Resilience to Global Health Challenges Through Nutritional Gut Microbiome Modulation.Nutrients · 2025Review
- Bowel function in a prospective cohort of 1052 healthy term infants up to 4 months of age.European journal of pediatrics · 2024Article
- Article
- Reduce, reinforce, and replenish: safeguarding the early-life microbiota to reduce intergenerational health disparities.Frontiers in public health · 2024Review
- Sources of gut microbiota variation in a large longitudinal Finnish infant cohort.EBioMedicine · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeIn developed countries, data on the frequency of antibiotics given to mothers during childbirth are limited beyond the overall effect of all various prophylactic indications. Also, data on the impact of such antibiotics to the well-being of term babies are scarce. We aimed to characterize the frequency of antibiotic use during childbirth of term pregnancy. Secondly, we assessed whether the use of antibiotics was associated with any symptoms in infants.
methodsThis was a cross-sectional study of 1019 term deliveries of women participating in the prospective Health and Early Life Microbiota (HELMi) birth cohort study between March 2016 and March 2018 in the capital region of Finland. The data on antibiotic use were collected from the hospital records.
resultsIn total, 37% of the mothers received antibiotics during childbirth and 100% in Caesarean Sects. (17% of the deliveries). Less than 5% of antibiotics were non-prophylactic. In vaginal deliveries, the most common indication (18%) was prophylaxis for Group B Streptococcus. The most frequently used antibiotics were cefuroxime (22%) and benzylpenicillin (15%), and 56% received only one dose. In infants exposed to antibiotics during delivery, defecation frequency was higher during the first months (p-value < 0.0001- 0.0145), and weight gain was higher at the age of three months (p-value 0.0371).
conclusionMore than every third new-born in a developed country is exposed to antibiotics during birth. Our findings support the hypothesis that maternal antibiotics given during birth have an impact on the well-being of the infants. These findings should inform current policies for prophylactic antibiotics in childbirth.
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