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Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

cdc.gov

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Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#91

Post by watwut »

bedhead wrote: post #72

I remember years ago when I was studying various aspects of the health insurance market, there was one thing that really, truly alarmed me: the amount of Medicaid money spent on pregnancy-related care. It was shocking to me. Pregnant women who don't see their doctors regularly end up costing the system an absolute fortune. It is a sad plague among many of the poor who have lots of problems themselves, a big one being…

Pregnancy and generally anything to do with doctors in USA are super expensive.

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#92

Post by narrator »

What's the official threshold for how many people have to die per year from something that is not related to tech to get a news story about it to the top of hacker news feed ? Dividing the number in the study by 3 and rounding up, and adding a bit for good measure, the answer seems to be about 500.

I'll do my part. Here's an article on all the ways you can die from household accidents which kill 18,000 Americans, probably including mothers with newborns, every year. I am sure that almost all of these were preventable.

https://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/the-home-front/2009/08/...

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#93

Post by [deleted] »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #75
disabled wrote: post #56

The third leading cause of death in the United States is believed to be preventable medical errors. Anyways, I have never been pregnant, but if you saw what happened to me medically this summer, you would be doing everything you could to be leaving the US. Anyways, I am a dual citizen. My other nationality is Croatian, but I don’t plan on living there. Even Croatia, you know which went through a horrific war 30 years…

What makes a medical error "preventable"?

[deleted]

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#94

Post by notch656a »

jjulius wrote: post #88
notch656a wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting they include things such as all suicides as pregnancy related death, though. If someone commits suicide 11 months after the kid is born there's no guarantees the reason was the pregnancy or the kid. It's possible but we can't really say that must be it.

>It's interesting they include things such as all suicides as pregnancy related death, though. That's not actually the case. If you look through the original linked article for the word "suicide" you come across the following... >Pregnancy-related deaths determined by the MMRCs to be suicides... ... which, by used of the word "determined" suggests that they're not just assuming all suicides within a year of giving bi…

I appreciate the clarification. It's still not clear to me to me whether the MMRC decided suicide was a pregnancy related death (as note 2 under table 4 seems to indicate). I think your interpretation was the MMRC decided which suicides were pregnancy related, whereas mine was that the MMRC decided that suicides within 1 year were pregnancy related.

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#95

Post by robmiller »

Just to add a little humanity here among all the numbers, I would have loved to have known my mother. I'm sure adopted children have similar thoughts, but I doubt there's anything quite the feeling of being given life during another's unwitting sacrifice. Would she have changed anything had she known the outcome? It occurred to me from a young age that I should try my best not to squander my opportunities in life.

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#96

Post by somenameforme »

StormChaser_5 wrote: post #41
csdvrx wrote: post #27

It's a theoretical claim (unproved, as acting on a system changes the system) Also, it's missing the crucial implication: at what price? With infinite amount of money, there are many things we could do. We don't have infinite money. Consider how the richest EU state in adjusted PPP per capita (so price levels can't be blamed) is just now barely richer than the poorest US state, in both the median and average Do we re…

Not sure where you ate getting that comparison. 2 mins on Google tells me [1] that ireland for example has a ppp per capita gdp of 79k vs USA average of 63k. Which would seem to imply that the first country in EU I compared with is significantly higher than at least some of us states? And that isn't a recent development. The choice isn't about getting massively poorer, it's just whether you want to be able to look yo…

That's nominal, severely outdated, and severely misleading. Ireland is the third richest [1] country in the world on paper as far as GDP/capita PPP measures, while in reality the household income/capita is a small fraction of that. The reason their GDP is so high is that hundreds of multinationals (including Google, Facebook, Apple, etc) filter large sums of money through Ireland in tax avoidance schemes. It's one of the best examples of how GDP is a very silly metric.

Incidentally, it's also the only country in the EU with a higher GDP/capita than the US.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#98

Post by wxnx »

A timely study, certainly.

It's important to note that risk factors for mortality overlap significantly with the risk factors for other serious adverse events (see e.g. disability status [1], or HELPP syndrome [2]). In a sense, mortality (although fortunately rare as noted in other comments) is therefore a useful proxy for other severe, potentially life-changing adverse pregnancy-related medical events which are much more common than just plain death. (As an analogy, something like 10-15% of heart attacks are fatal, but many more are debilitating.)

[1] doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.38414

[2] doi:10.1111/1471-0528.16225

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#99

Post by watwut »

nsxwolf wrote: post #24
malfist wrote: post #2

Maternity healthcare in the US is one of the worst in the developed nations. And yet we're banning abortion, and doing nothing to fix it. Even WIC has came under attack in the past. Protecting the unborn is very convenient. They make no demands of you. Edit: WIC: Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) https://www.fns.usda.gov/wic

Are you saying the solution to maternity related deaths is abortion here? Eliminating maternal death by eliminating maternity? I don't understand.

Actually, yes, some deaths and suffering would be preventable if doctors did not had to wait till the pregnant woman is septic or otherwise in acute life threatening situation.

In some cases, ending pregnancy is how you eliminate maternal death.

Re: Pregnancy-Related Deaths: Data from Maternal Mortality Review Committees

#100

Post by logicalmonster »

echelon wrote: post #46
coderintherye wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>First is that we report maternal mortality even when not directly associated with birth -- "Among pregnancy-related deaths with information on timing, 53% occurred 7–365 days postpartum." If someone gets a surgery and then dies 8 days later due to complications from the surgery, you don't go around saying the death was "not directly associated" with the surgery. There are lots of things that affect the body during p…

> dies 8 days later due to complications But 365 days? That's sounds like it's mental health related. It seems like we should track cause of death so we can have richer and more actionable information. Edit: I didn't mean to imply that this wasn't postpartum depression. I was curious if/why other nations aren't tracking the full calendar year after birth, and if our way of counting prevents us from directly comparing…

> It seems like we should track cause of death so we can have richer and more actionable information.

I hope I'm remembering this right, and please correct me if my memory or interpretation of this isn't correct.

When Covid first emerged and people were diving deeply into all kinds of mortality statistics, one story I saw that was kind of shocking is that there's been no genuine system for counting flu deaths in a normal year. You'd think flu deaths are basically counted by doing something relatively sane such as tallying up deaths in a database labelled with flu (more or less), but it's actually sort of a statistical guess based on number of deaths in a given time period, subtracted by other causes (accidents, cancers, murders, etc), and whatever's left over is labelled with flu.

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