University of Weatern Ontario, Canada study to estimate to what extent computerized fetal heart rate (FHR) parameters are affected by labor and to estimate the relationship between FHR parameters and the degree of fetal metabolic acidosis in laboring patients at term.
Study concluded that in term pregnant women with reassuring FHR tracing, labor causes an increase in both short- and long-term FHR variation, which was abolished in the presence of nonreassuring FHR tracing. Computer-derived FHR parameters studied during the last hour of labor were not correlated with the degree of metabolic acidosis as measured in the umbilical artery at birth.
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