Objective        To investigate the clinical features of premature birth from a large-scale hospital in Chongqing.        Methods        Based on the medical records

clinical data of women who gave birth prematurely in a certain hospital from 2007 to 2012 were collected

and analyzed for individual characteristics

premature birth and treatment. The software SPSS 13.0 was used to for statistical analysis on the data.       Results        There were 599 cases of premature birth brought into our analysis. Before delivery

all of these cases had received the prenatal and pregnancy health care. During the past 6 years

the rate of premature birth were 6.2%

5.4%

5.7%

4.6%

4.5% and 3.9% respectively

in a trend of decreasing. The proportion of premature birth at extremely early stage

early stage

mid-term

and late stage were 1.2%

10.0%

14.4% and 74.5% respectively. Therapeutic preterm birth accounted for 65.4%. The proportion of premature birth was apparently higher for women who had more than 3 times of pregnant history (46.6%) than those with pregnant history of once (25.0%) or twice (28.4%). Among these women

65% of them had a miscarriage history

and 51.9% were surgical abortion. The premature birth rate was 12.5% for women who were younger than 18 and older than 40

significantly higher than the other age groups (3.8%). The proportions of top 3 complications during pregnancy were diabetes mellitus (15.0%)

anemia (9.7%) and hepatitis B (6.0%). The top 3 pregnancy complications were premature rupture of membrane (42.4%)

intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy (16.7%) and placenta praevia (9.7%). There were 43% neonates with weight lower than 2.5 kg

and 25.9% with umbilical cord around the neck. The percentage of the newborn infants with normal Apgar score was 91.7% in the women with premature birth of late stage

significantly higher than those of extremely early stage and early stage. The days of hospital stay and cost were greater in the premature birth than in non-premature birth women.       Conclusion        Prenatal and pregnancy health care makes the incidence of premature birth in a trend of decreasing. But therapeutic preterm birth rate is still high

and pregnant complications need to be well prevented and controlled.