Risk of breech birth can be passed on by parents

A BABY is twice as likely to be born bottom first if either or both parents were themselves breech deliveries, indicating the position is inherited, a study published today has found.

The vast majority of babies are born head first, with fewer than one in 20 the other way round, researchers found.

Such deliveries carry significantly greater risks for babies, who are more likely to die or suffer from health problems, the British Medical Journal, which is publishing the study, said.

Researchers from the University of Bergen looked at data covering all the births in Norway between 1967 and 2004. They studied available information on men and women and their first-born children – a total of 387,555 parent-and-child units.

They found that people who had been delivered full-term in the breech position had more than twice the risk of breech delivery in their own first pregnancies.

Babies delivered naturally were at the biggest risk of a breech delivery, and the risk of a breech birth was equally pronounced for male and female parents.

The authors suggested genes predisposed to a breech delivery are transferred to the foetus, which increases the risk of a breech delivery.