NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A pregnancy that stretches 2 weeks or more beyond the due date may not only be uncomfortable for the expectant mother but may also have detrimental effects on the brain of her fetus, according to preliminary study results.

The extra-long gestation may cause problems that are evident during the child's preschool years, study author Dr. Michael Divon of Lenox-Hill Hospital in New York told Reuters Health.

``It's possible that pregnancies that reach 42 weeks or more are associated with problems later on in life,'' he said.

Lenox and his colleagues performed a long-term study of 284 children delivered at 42 or more weeks gestation. For comparison, they also studied 382 children who were born at 37 to 41 weeks. A full term pregnancy is 40 weeks.

In general, the study group weighed more at birth, were longer and had larger head sizes than the comparison infants, the investigators reported last week during the 22nd annual meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine in New Orleans, Louisiana.

By the ages of 4 and/or 5.5 years, roughly 6% of the study group had a motor or speech deficiency, an attention deficit, or some other major developmental abnormality, in comparison to about 3% of their peers, study findings indicate.

The prolonged pregnancies did not seem to contribute to any vision or hearing deficiencies among the study group or any differences in growth between the two groups, other than an increased incidence of abnormal head sizes at 12 months of age among the study group infants.

``The challenge is to identify which post-date pregnancies are more likely to result in a problem,'' Divon said.

Most pregnancies that are labeled as post-date, however, ''are falsely labeled so,'' the researcher added. To prevent this from happening, ``gestational age has to be established early in pregnancy...by an early ultrasound,'' he said.

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