The odds of death during delivery of a baby are much higher in women who have epilepsy in comparisons to the ones who doesn’t.
The lead author of the study Sarah MacDonald has said that the maximum number of death that occurs to women at the time of child delivery is caused due to epilepsy and it was not easy to point it out from the remaining data in the past.
She has also added that during the time of a C-section delivery, the risk is more intense. It was also expressed by her that more researches are needed to understand the main reasons for these complications further. It is about time the medical experts understand the risk factors in depth, she added.
MacDonald is from the department of epidemiology at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. “While the absolute risk is still quite small, this was very surprising and couldn’t have really been predicted from the smaller data sets that are more commonly presented in the literature. We would argue you don’t necessarily need a doubling of a risk to be an important outcome.” MacDonald said.
According to researchers, they have also found the risk for delivery complications had been higher in women with epilepsy. She added, “We also found that women with epilepsy were at increased risk for cesarean delivery, prolonged hospital stay, preeclempsia [pregnancy-related high blood pressure], preterm labor and stillbirth.”
In addition to that, the study authors have also said, “We need to understand the mechanisms underlying these risks, including death, so that we can identify the specific populations at risk and devise interventions to reduce these risks.”
MacDonald also notes “That’s sort of the frustrating thing. The question that we all have now is that are all women at epilepsy at higher risk, because we see many women with epilepsy going through pregnancy and delivery without a problem. We are not currently treating these pregnancies at high risk, so an overall shift may be needed in our perception of the risk in pregnancy for women in epilepsy. Given this additional evidence accumulated, we would argue that an update to the literature may be in order.”
