Health & Medicine
Home Births Reduce Maternal Complications in Low Risk Women
Benita Matilda
First Posted: Jun 15, 2013 04:34 AM EDT
Pregnancy is beautiful but at the same time it is very stressful. This joyous period brings a lot of worrying along with it. And a major chunk of these worries involves maternal complications.
A new study offers relief to those undergoing this phase suggesting planned home births reduce the risk of adverse maternal outcomes when compared to hospital births.
This nationwide cohort study was conducted in Netherlands and suggests that those women with low risk pregnancies who prefer to give birth at home have a reduced risk of severe complications when compared to women who plan to give birth in a hospital.
The researchers' however emphasize on the fact that the overall risk of severe problems is small and the results are not for first time mums.
Compared to all the western countries, Netherlands has the highest number of home births, which are done in the presence of a midwife. So this made it easier for the researchers to compare the outcomes of whether planned home births have a higher rate of rare but severe outcomes known as severe acute maternal morbidity or SAMM in low risk women with that of planned hospital births.
The researchers based this on the admissions to an intensive care unit, uterine rupture, eclampsia or major obstetric hemorrhage (requiring a large blood transfusion). The adverse complications included postpartum hemorrhage and manual removal of the placenta.
They examined the data of over 146,000 low risk women in primary care at the onset of labour. The data was taken from a national study into maternal morbidity and national birth registry from August 2004 to August 2006. Out of the total women, nearly 63 percent had planned home births and just 37 percent had given birth in a hospital.
For women giving birth for the first time, rate of complications for home births was 2.3 per 1000 when compared to 3.1 per 1000 for planned births at hospitals. Planned home deliveries had a19.6 per 1000 rate of postpartum hemorrhage and for planned hospital births it was 37.6 per 1000.
Planned home births had lesser adverse outcomes compared to planned hospital births.
"Low risk women in primary care with planned home birth at the onset of labour had a lower rate of severe acute maternal morbidity, postpartum haemorrhage, and manual removal of placenta than those with planned hospital birth. These differences were statistically significant for parous women (those who've had a birth before)," the authors concluded.
This study was published in the journal BMJ.
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First Posted: Jun 15, 2013 04:34 AM EDT
Pregnancy is beautiful but at the same time it is very stressful. This joyous period brings a lot of worrying along with it. And a major chunk of these worries involves maternal complications.
A new study offers relief to those undergoing this phase suggesting planned home births reduce the risk of adverse maternal outcomes when compared to hospital births.
This nationwide cohort study was conducted in Netherlands and suggests that those women with low risk pregnancies who prefer to give birth at home have a reduced risk of severe complications when compared to women who plan to give birth in a hospital.
The researchers' however emphasize on the fact that the overall risk of severe problems is small and the results are not for first time mums.
Compared to all the western countries, Netherlands has the highest number of home births, which are done in the presence of a midwife. So this made it easier for the researchers to compare the outcomes of whether planned home births have a higher rate of rare but severe outcomes known as severe acute maternal morbidity or SAMM in low risk women with that of planned hospital births.
The researchers based this on the admissions to an intensive care unit, uterine rupture, eclampsia or major obstetric hemorrhage (requiring a large blood transfusion). The adverse complications included postpartum hemorrhage and manual removal of the placenta.
They examined the data of over 146,000 low risk women in primary care at the onset of labour. The data was taken from a national study into maternal morbidity and national birth registry from August 2004 to August 2006. Out of the total women, nearly 63 percent had planned home births and just 37 percent had given birth in a hospital.
For women giving birth for the first time, rate of complications for home births was 2.3 per 1000 when compared to 3.1 per 1000 for planned births at hospitals. Planned home deliveries had a19.6 per 1000 rate of postpartum hemorrhage and for planned hospital births it was 37.6 per 1000.
Planned home births had lesser adverse outcomes compared to planned hospital births.
"Low risk women in primary care with planned home birth at the onset of labour had a lower rate of severe acute maternal morbidity, postpartum haemorrhage, and manual removal of placenta than those with planned hospital birth. These differences were statistically significant for parous women (those who've had a birth before)," the authors concluded.
This study was published in the journal BMJ.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone