Women who have complications during pregnancy and childbirth have a higher risk of dying: study

By Jim Leffman via SWNS

Women who suffer complications during pregnancy and childbirth can have a higher risk of dying for the next 50 years, a new study reveals.

Conditions such as pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes and preterm delivery were all linked to a greater risk of death in the decades following birth compared to those who had typical pregnancies and deliveries.

The study published in the journal Circulation and carried out by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania showed complications can have deadly implications as long as 50 years later.

Researchers used long-range, racially-inclusive data to look at the long-term effects of complicated childbirths which have often been overlooked.

It can lead to serious, lifelong health issues such as heart disease, diabetes, and other life-shortening conditions.

Lead author, Dr. Stefanie Hinkle, an assistant professor of Epidemiology at Penn Medicine said: "We know that the context of childbirth has changed since the 1950s and ‘60s, but these findings demonstrate how crucial it is to people’s long-term health that we invest in preventive care and screenings for people with complicated pregnancies and deliveries, both then and today."

The US has a particularly bad death rate for mums at birth at more than 23 in every 100,000, three times the rate of the nearest developed country, France.

These figures account for deaths in childbirth and during the immediate postpartum period but the new study shows how the toll could be much worse.

Hinkle and her co-authors drew on data collected from more than 46,000 people who’d given birth at a dozen United States health centers between 1959 and 1966.

The patients were tracked for deaths of any kind until 2016, at which time 39 percent, roughly 18,000, had died.

They found that pre-term childbirth of three weeks or more due to spontaneous labor was tied to a seven percent increase in the risk of death compared to those who delivered a baby full-term.

The risk climbed to 23 percent for those whose water broke before term, 31 percent for preterm induced labor and actually more than doubled to 109 percent for patients who had a pre-term cesarean delivery, all compared to those who hadn’t had these types of deliveries.

When it came to high blood pressure conditions such as the pre-eclampsia risk of death in subsequent years ranged from nine percent for those with high blood pressure tied specifically to their pregnancy to 32 percent for those who already had high blood pressure before their pregnancy and then developed preeclampsia in their pregnancy.

Finally, gestational diabetes or high blood sugar levels in pregnancy increased the risk of death in the following decades by 14 percent.

Overall, the death rate for black patients was higher than for white patients, 41 percent of black patients in the sample compared to 37 percent of white patients.

Pre-term delivery — and, thus, the risk of complications — was much more common, comparatively, in black patients than white patients (20 to nine percent).

Hinkle added: “Future work should seek to understand whether intervening earlier in the postpartum period among high-risk patients prevents future disease incidence.

“Our group is also currently working to identify low-cost interventions to potentially prevent complicated pregnancies and deliveries.”