Subjective Recording of Fetal Movements

Abstract

Maternal counting of fetal movements is increasingly used as a clinical method for assessment of fetal health. The present study established normal limits for two methods of subjective fetal movement recording. Four hundred-and-seventeen randomly selected women with low-risk pregnancies recorded the time necessary for 10 fetal movements every morning and also the number of fetal movements during 15 min every evening. The study was carried out between gestational week 34 and parturition. Two hundred-and-twenty-two consecutive women answered a questionnaire after the end of the study. 70% of the women counted fetal movements every day; 66.5% preferred the evening to the morning recording. In a strictly selected normal group (n = 129), no significant change was found in the number of fetal movements or in the time for 10 fetal movements with advancing gestation or approaching parturition. The results of the evening sessions were not influenced by maternal parity, fetal weight, or fetal sex. The great interindividual variation in the results does not allow the application of general normal limits. A method for establishing individual normal low limits for each pregnancy was designed.

Temporal patterns in count-to-tenfetal movement charts and their associations with pregnancy characteristics: a prospective cohort study

“…Contrary to previous studies reporting that counting times remain constant [19,28,33] or increase [20-22] with advancing gestation, we found increasing gestational age to be associated with shorter counting times (FPC1). However, as mentioned, direct comparisons with previous studies may be misleading, as these tend to not account for the intra-woman correlation in FM chart data.…”

“…However, previous FM counting studies have mainly focused on fixed limits for DFM and their ability to identify risk [5]. Analyses of patterns in FM counting charts have mostly been restricted to healthy pregnancies aiming to define limits of normality [21,22,33]. These studies have, with few exceptions [20,34], focused on group averages and deviations from these [14,21,22], ignoring that observations from the same woman are naturally ordered in time, and strongly correlated.…”

“…Although previous studies have rightly recognized the potential limitations of point-wise measures [20,33,35], none have provided meaningful alternatives. Our statistical approach demonstrates how temporal patterns in FM charts hold valuable information for the interpretation of relevant counting measures, and how this can be overlooked when not taking the temporal nature of FM chart data into account.…”