Joost von Schmidt, MD, of Leiden University Medical Center, discusses his research into the association between preeclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage during the poster session at the Society of Maternal and Fetal Medicine's 32nd Annual Meeting. A transcript of the video is below.
I’m Joost von Schmidt, I’m from Leiden University Medical Center, and I’m here to present my research which was about preeclampsia and the association between preeclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage.
We looked at the association between preeclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage in a large database, more than 340,000 deliveries in the Netherlands, both hospital and home births—so both high- and low-risk pregnancies—and they have a great coverage of 95% of midwife practices and 99% of hospital registries.
We defined preeclampsia as a minimum of 90 diastolic blood pressure and the occurrence of proteinuria, and also, of course, we defined postpartum hemorrhage as 1,000 milliliters of blood loss.
Afterwards we identified confounders for the association of preeclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage, which were maternal age, parity, socioeconomic status, multiple pregnancies, and gestational age.
Through multivariate analysis we corrected for the confounders and after correction we still saw an increased risk of 1.5 odds ratio. So… there is increased risk, a 1.5-fold increased risk, of postpartum hemorrhage when someone has preeclampsia. Clinicians should be aware of that when they manage the third stage of labor.
The only thing that we weren’t able to correct for is magnesium sulfate(Drug information on magnesium sulfate) use, so that’s one of the things we have to look at in the future research. Thank you.
Read our complete coverage of the Society of Maternal and Fetal Medicine's 32nd Annual Meeting, including:
SMFM: Progesterone(Drug information on progesterone) Does Not Prolong Pregnancy After Successful Tocolytic Treatment
SMFM: Induction of Labor Reduces Trauma Risk for Large-for-Date Fetuses
