Risk of maternal mortality in women with severe anaemia during pregnancy and post partum: a multilevel analysis

Publication date: Available online 20 March 2018 Source:The Lancet Global Health Author(s): Jahnavi Daru, Javier Zamora, Borja M Fernández-Félix, Joshua Vogel, Olufemi T Oladapo, Naho Morisaki, Özge Tunçalp, Maria Regina Torloni, Suneeta Mittal, Kapila Jayaratne, Pisake Lumbiganon, Ganchimeg Togoobaatar, Shakila Thangaratinam, Khalid S Khan Background Anaemia affects as many as half of all pregnant women in low-income and middle-income countries, but the burden of disease and associated maternal mortality are not robustly quantified. We aimed to assess the association between severe anaemia and maternal death with data from the WHO Multicountry Survey on maternal and newborn health. Methods We used multilevel and propensity score regression analyses to establish the relation between severe anaemia and maternal death in 359 health facilities in 29 countries across Latin America, Africa, the Western Pacific, eastern Mediterranean, and southeast Asia. Severe anaemia was defined as antenatal or postnatal haemoglobin concentrations of less than 70 g/L in a blood sample obtained before death. Maternal death was defined as death any time after admission until the seventh day post partum or discharge. In regression analyses, we adjusted for post-partum haemorrhage, general anaesthesia, admission to intensive care, sepsis, pre-eclampsia or eclampsia, thrombocytopenia, shock, massive transfusion, severe oliguria, failure to form clots, and severe acidosis as confou...
Source: The Lancet Global Health - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research