Drinking coffee while pregnant may not be harmful.

How much coffee you consume while pregnant doesn't appear to have an impact on the baby's weight, whether it is born early, or your chance of having a stillbirth or miscarriage.

Throughout their pregnancy, pregnant women are given numerous nutritional guidelines. One of the most common pieces of advice is to consume less coffee.

In a recent study, Gunn-Helen Moen and associates looked into whether coffee consumption during pregnancy affected the weight of the foetus or whether a premature birth occurred. Additionally, they investigated if drinking coffee increased the chance of miscarriage or stillbirth.

According to these measurements, there is no correlation between the number of cups of coffee consumed daily by pregnant women and the risk to the unborn child, says Moen.

She works as a researcher at the University of Oslo's Institute of Clinical Medicine.

However, she adds, "We cannot rule out the possibility that coffee may have other effects on the foetus that we did not examine in our study."

Prior research reached the opposite outcome.

However, earlier research found that caffeine might be hazardous to an unborn child. These investigations, however, were what are known as observational studies, which have a study design that makes it challenging to demonstrate causation.

Therefore, this research could not demonstrate that caffeine is hazardous, claims Moen.

Other confounding factors could be to blame for the link that the researchers discovered in earlier investigations. She says that it can have been brought on by smoking or drinking alcohol while pregnant, for instance.

Nevertheless, the results of these investigations prompted widespread advice to limit or avoid coffee consumption during pregnancy.

The right advice must be given to expectant women.

The goal of researcher Gunn-Helen Moen is to improve the documentation of pregnancy risk factors. She thinks that advice given to expectant mothers should be supported by solid research.

The results would have been crucial for expectant mothers who want to lower the risk if our study had shown that there was a connection between how much coffee pregnant women consume and their baby's birth weight, whether the kid is born early, or the chance of miscarriage and stillbirth. Then, she claims, they may have decided to consume less coffee.

But that wasn't the situation.

It's crucial to employ innovative techniques in research on pregnancy risk factors. We must make sure that the advice we give to expectant mothers is reliable. We must be careful not to make recommendations that serve no useful purpose or effect, says Moen.

It is difficult to research pregnancy risk factors because of ethics.

Commonly, medical researchers want to use so-called randomized-controlled trials to investigate causal correlations (RCTs). The study participants are randomly split into two or more groups, making sure that all of them are equal aside from the intervention under study. Then, one group of pregnant women would have been instructed to drink a lot of coffee while the other group would have been instructed to drink little to no coffee in order to determine whether coffee consumption is hazardous during pregnancy.

The number of instances of, say, low birth weight in the two groups would then be looked at by the researchers.

It is challenging to carry out this research during pregnancy, though. According to Moen, it is unethical to ask pregnant women to perform tasks that could endanger the foetus or themselves.

Research on gene variations linked to coffee consumption

As a result, Moen and his colleagues have created a novel technique that can offer clearer solutions while also being safe.

The approach entails analysing genes to check for potential risk factors during pregnancy. There are DNA variations that are connected to things like a person's coffee consumption.

According to our research, some genetic variations were significantly correlated with the quantity of coffee consumed by pregnant women. She goes on:

After that, we looked into how coffee consumption affected a child's weight, risk of miscarriage, and the chance of having a stillbirth using genetic variants.

For this, Moen and colleagues examined data from the ALSPAC cohort and the British UK biobank study, which involved over 250,000 women. About 6,800 expectant mothers and their kids make up ALSPAC.

Aspires to research the impact of additional dietary recommendations

The effects of coffee drinking during pregnancy will be the subject of further investigation by researcher Gunn-Helen Moen. She wants to find out if drinking coffee has an impact on metrics other than those considered in the current study.

The same methodology will be used by her to contribute to further documentation on other dietary guidelines that expectant women are urged to abide by.

Several academics in our study group are interested in the connections between prenatal nutritional advice and the child's health. According to Moen, we are preparing a number of research in which we will examine numerous variables in more detail.