United States: The official US government paper about maternal mortality rise from 2018 to 2022 identifies the problem as urgent for public health services.
The report gained special attention among researchers because it emerged when federal health agencies responsible for maternal death reduction programs lost staff members and funding support.
Staff Cuts Hit as Pregnancy Risks Soar
A week ago, most staff members responsible for maternal and child health monitoring and improvement at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) received leave, and researchers studying maternal mortality lost their funding.
According to Rose Molina, an OB-GYN at Harvard Medical School, who co-authored the study, “It’s a hard time for this to come out,” statnews.com reported.
“We cannot take our eyes off of maternal health right now, and if anything, we need to not just maintain focus but actually increase investment in maternal health to bring down some of what we’re seeing — increases in pregnancy-related death rates, but also persistent inequities by racial and ethnic groups,” Molina stated.
The main authors from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were unable to discuss the study findings.
JAMA Network Open published the new paper Wednesday, which examined long-term maternal health outcomes by studying birth-related deaths until patients reached one year postpartum.
The researchers expanded their study length to discover that heart disease, along with cancer and mental disorders, accounted for most late maternal deaths.
A CDC database different from the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System provided data for the analysis in this paper following its latest budget reduction.
The maternal mortality rate increased about 27% from 25.3 to 32.6 deaths per 100,000 live births from 2018 to 2022 when applying age adjustment methods, statnews.com reported.
The key conclusion presented in the study confirms findings from earlier studies, according to Marie Thoma, who works as a reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist at the University of Maryland.
The recent study expanded the understanding of state-based mortality by strengthening the evidence for racial disparities.
The death rate of American Indian and Alaska Native women during pregnancy and childbirth stood at 3.8 times the rate of white women, while the Black maternal death rate reached 2.8 times higher than white women.