Infection with COVID-19 at any time during pregnancy increases the risk of maternal death and is linked to severe illness in mothers and their newborns, according to a review of pooled data from foreign evidence, published in the open-access journal BMJ Global Health.
The findings reinforce the need for global efforts to minimize the dangers of pregnancy from infection through targeted vaccination campaigns and other protective measures, the researchers say.
There is a huge and developing framework of studies on pregnancy with COVID-19 infection. But important differences in study design, strategies and comparison equipment make it difficult to draw definitive conclusions, with few studies aggregated in low-income countries, the researchers say.
Researchers formed a foreign consortium in April 2020 to download high-quality prospective knowledge from applicable studies conducted in several countries and implemented a consistent analytical technique for disorders related to previous research.
Existing research, which includes the effects of the first investigation of the individual-level pooled information from those studies, assesses the risks of poor fitness and death in pregnant women with or without a proven or probable COVID-19 infection.
The research is on participants in 12 studies involving 13,136 pregnant women in Ghana, China-Hong Kong, Italy, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Turkey, Uganda and the United States.
It shows that pregnant women infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19 infection, were nearly eight times more likely to die than their non-inflamed peers.
And they were nearly four times more likely to require extensive care; 1 five times more likely to require mechanical ventilation; and more than five times more likely to require some form of extensive care.
They were also more than 23 times more likely to be diagnosed with pneumonia and more than five times more likely to have serious blood clots.
Babies born to women inflamed with COVID-19 were nearly twice as likely to be admitted to a neonatal care unit; almost 3 times more likely to be born preterm (before 34 weeks); and 19% more likely to have low birth weight than young children born to women without inflammation.
But, contrary to findings from previous reviews, COVID-19 infection is not linked to an increased threat of stillbirth at 28 weeks of pregnancy or more, nor to limited growth.
The researchers point out some limitations of their study. The variety of pregnant women with COVID-19 depended on when and how they were tested for SARS-CoV-2; This has replaced over time from one site to another with the availability of control kits. The research did not take into account the incremental effect of SARS-CoV-2 variants that emerged since the beginning of the pandemic. Some resultados. no monitored by a clinically significant time era were also obtained.
Despite those caveats, “those findings underscore the need for global efforts to save your COVID-19 pregnancy through targeted delivery of vaccines and non-pharmaceutical interventions,” the researchers say.
This is because: “Global standards have been equivocal about the potential dangers of infection and the benefits and protection of vaccination, and more than 80 countries have not lately proposed that all pregnant and lactating women be vaccinated,” they note.
BMJ
Smith, E. R. , et al. (2023) Adverse maternal, fetal and neonatal outcomes in pregnant women inflamed with SARS-CoV-2: a meta-analysis of knowledge of individual participants. Global Health BMJ. doi. org/10. 1136/bmjgh-2022-009495.
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