Prevention of preterm birth: Proactive and reactive clinical practice-are we on the right track?

Preterm birth remains the major cause of death and disability among children under the age of five. In developing countries antenatal preterm birth prevention clinics are set up to provide cervical length surveillance and/or treatment modalities such as cerclage or progesterone for those women with identified risk factors such as previous cervical treatment or preterm birth. However, 85% of women have no risk factors for PTB and currently there is no biomarker to screen women early in pregnancy. Women will present unexpectedly in threatened preterm labour and we have no choice but to adopt a re-active approach to their care by using predication and preparation strategies such as fetal fibronectin, tocolytic therapy and steroids. Despite these strategies approximately 15–20% of these women will give birth preterm before 34 weeks. There is a urgent need to re-design primary, secondary and tertiary prevention strategies for spontaneous preterm labour (sPTL) in singleton pregnancies aimed at identifying and addressing key gaps in clinical practice and research.