As recently written about on Scope, the California Quality Care Collaborative organized a task force and produced a toolkit of recommendations for treating preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication marked by hypertension that can kill pregnant women and new mothers.
An article in the San Francisco Chronicle details one woman's health emergency and stillbirth experience owing to the condition. "I wish I had known more about preeclampsia," Elizabeth Barnett, the 33-year-old mother, told Stephanie M. Lee. "Not that the outcome necessarily could have been that much different because of how severe I had it, but I definitely would have gone into the hospital earlier and would have been more on top of it."
The piece emphasizes why recognizing and treating preeclampsia and eclampsia – which may induce deadly seizures – is paramount for expectant mothers and their health care providers.
From the Chronicle:
"Nobody realizes it's a problem. Preeclampsia is the most common medical complication of pregnancy essentially," said [Maurice Druzin, MD], an obstetrics and gynecology professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and an attending physician at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. Druzin helped lead the group of clinicians that wrote the guidebook.
From 2002 to 2004 in California, 25 women died of preeclampsia or eclampsia, making up 17 percent of all pregnancy-related deaths in the state during that time, according to an analysis of the most recent data. The number of maternal deaths in California, in general, is relatively small. The numbers had, in fact, been declining for years, but increased between 1999 and 2010 because of chronic conditions among pregnant women, variety in quality of pre- and postnatal care and other factors.
Previously: New preeclampsia toolkit will help prevent maternal deaths and Could exercise before and during early pregnancy lower risk of pre-eclampsia?
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