A high-risk pregnancy might pose challenges before, during or after delivery. If you have a high-risk pregnancy, you and your baby might need special monitoring or care throughout your pregnancy. Understand what causes a high-risk pregnancy, and what you can do to take care of yourself and your baby.

What are the risk factors for a high-risk pregnancy?

Sometimes a high-risk pregnancy is the result of a medical condition present before pregnancy. In other cases, a medical condition that develops during pregnancy for either mom or baby causes a pregnancy to become high risk.

Specific factors that might contribute to a high-risk pregnancy include:

• Advanced maternal age:- Pregnancy risks are higher for mothers age 35 and older.
• Lifestyle choices:- Smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and using illegal drugs can put a pregnancy at risk.
• Medical history:- A prior C-section, low birth weight baby or preterm birth — birth before 37 weeks of pregnancy — might increase the risk in subsequent pregnancies. Other risk factors include a family history of genetic conditions, a history of pregnancy loss or the death of a baby shortly after birth.

FibroidA hysterectomy is an operation to remove a woman's uterus (womb). The uterus is where a baby grows when a woman is pregnant. In some cases, the ovaries and fallopian tubes also are removed. These organs are located in a woman’s lower abdomen. The cervix is the lower end of the uterus. The ovaries are organs that produce eggs and hormones. The fallopian tubes carry eggs from the ovaries to the uterus.

There are several types of hysterectomies:

• Complete or total:- Removes the cervix as well as the uterus. (This is the most common type of hysterectomy).
• Partial or subtotal:- Removes the upper part of the uterus and leaves the cervix in place.
• Radical: Removes the uterus, the cervix, the upper part of the vagina, and supporting tissues. (This is done in some cases of cancer.) Often one or both ovaries and fallopian tubes are removed at the same time a hysterectomy is done.

Excessive menstrual bleeding affects one in five women.

The amount of blood lost in each period varies enormously from individual to individual. Some women lose a few teaspoonfuls and hardly notice their periods, while other women regularly lose large volumes of blood. Because of this wide variation it is impossible to define a 'normal' period in terms of the amount, length, and frequency of bleeding. A heavy period for one woman may be normal for another.

However, for any individual woman, the amount of blood lost every month tends to remain relatively constant, apart from slight variations with age. It would be unusual for a woman to lose a few teaspoonfuls of blood one month and a pint of blood the next. Because the amount of blood loss is relatively constant, each individual woman tends to consider her own periods to be normal for her, and usually only worries about them or consults her doctor when she feels that her periods have changed.

In each menstrual cycle, follicles grow on the ovaries. Eggs develop within those follicles, one of which will reach maturity faster than the others and be released into the fallopian tubes. This is "ovulation". The remaining follicles will degenerate.In the case of polycystic ovaries, however, the ovaries are larger than normal, and there are a series of undeveloped follicles that appear in clumps, somewhat like a bunch of grapes. Polycystic ovaries are not especially troublesome and may not even affect your fertility.

However, when the cysts cause a hormonal imbalance, a pattern of symptoms may develop. This pattern of symptoms is called a syndrome. These symptoms are the difference between suffering from polycystic ovary syndrome and from polycystic ovaries.

So you can have polycystic ovaries without having PCOS. However, nearly all women with PCOS will have polycystic ovaries. Polycystic Ovary Syndrome is the name given to a metabolic condition in which a woman will have polycystic ovaries, along with a certain pattern of other symptoms that reflect imbalances in reproductive and other hormones.