Caffeine and Pregnancy

Catrina Boggess

1 White

11/13/2016

Caffeine

Experts say that caffeine is the most widely used drug in the world.Caffeine can be found in drinks and foods everywhere. People may think caffeine is a non- harmful drug that everyone uses everyday, but they don’t know the real story of how Caffeine works.

Caffeine is a stimulant, a stimulant is a chemical that raises the levels of physiological or nervous activity in the body. Furthermore Caffeine is psychoactive, which means that it affects your central nervous system. Small doses of Caffeine will make your heart beat faster. The effects can last from 2.5 to 7.5 hours. It takes 30 hours to get it out of the system. The “kick” in caffeine comes from molecules similar to adenosine, a chemical that your body manufactures. Adenosine keeps your brain at a regular pace, which means that it controls brain activity through receptors, or gateways. Drinking beverages with caffeine can make the brain receptors mistake the caffeine molecules for adenosine. The receptors “link” with the caffeine and block out the adenosine, without adenosine to slow it down, your brain revs up.

The effects of Caffeine are quite interesting. Caffeine can make your blood vessels smaller, and that makes it harder for your heart to pump blood through your body, therefore your heart beats faster. Caffeine can bring on a heart condition called Tachycardia or also known as “Runaway heart-beat”. Larger doses can make you anxious and nervous. It can cause stomach problems by creating more stomach acid. Caffeine can interfere with sleep. Since you have more stomach acid, it will make you urinate more, it also can cause diarrhea.

Overtime you can develop a tolerance to Caffeine. Your body will need more of it to feel the same lift you once got from just a little dose. Without caffeine you will feel uncomfortable and have withdrawal symptoms. These symptoms consist of discomfort, headaches, a decrease in energy, depression, and fatigue or drowsiness. This drug may be used everyday with millions of people all over the world, but it does not mean it is safe to use.

Caffeine greatly affects people who are healthy, but imagine if someone was pregnant and was going through the same symptoms. In this scenario, it's not only the mother going through the symptoms, but the fetus is also going through it too.

Caffeine crosses the placenta into the amniotic fluid and into the the fetus's bloodstream. The fetus is still developing, but now it needs to take time to process the caffeine. The fetus is then exposed to the effects of caffeine,and it affects them much longer than the mother. Mothers who consume more than 300 mg of caffeine a day we more likely to give birth to babies who were small for their gestational age. As