Study: Black women most likely to face dangerous childbirth complications

Kristen Jordan Shamus | Detroit Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Giving birth may shorten life expectancy, study finds Cellular mortality predictors in mothers show that aging is accelerated with each child birthed. Buzz60's Tony Spitz has the details.

Childbirth can kill you — but that's especially true if you're a black woman in America.

University of Michigan researchers published a new study that will appear in the November issue of the Journal Obstetrics & Gynecology that reveals just how much a woman's risk of developing a life-threatening condition while she's in the hospital for delivery depends on her racial and ethnic background and that patient's underlying health problems.

Although a life-threatening complication during childbirth occurred in 1.6 percent of all deliveries included in the study, non-Hispanic black women had a 70-percent higher rate of having a severe birth-related health problem than non-Hispanic white women.

White women also had better outcomes when it came to nearly every other childbirth complication than those who identified themselves as Hispanic, Native American or Alaska Native, or Asian or Pacific Islander, according to the study of 41,000 American women who underwent a lifesaving medical procedure while hospitalized for delivery from 2012-15.

Tennis star Serena Williams brought awareness to the issue of severe complications of childbirth last year, when she developed blood clots following the delivery of her daughter, Olympia Ohanian. Williams told Vogue that when doctors used blood thinners to treat the clots, which had traveled to her lungs, her cesarean-section incision hemorrhaged.

“Celebrities like Serena Williams who have shared their birth-related emergency stories publicly have drawn the national spotlight to the urgent need to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in care for women around the time of delivery," said lead study author Lindsay Admon, an obstetrician at Michigan Medicine’s Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital and member of the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. "To drive and target those changes, we need specific data like these.”

The study used data from 10 kinds of life-threatening conditions: blood transfusions — used mainly in women suffering a serious hemorrhage — were the most common, accounting for 75 percent of cases and the biggest racial disparity.

Other life-threatening complications considered in the study were heart failure, kidney failure, ventilation, shock, acute respiratory distress syndrome, eclampsia, hysterectomy and sepsis.

“Situations like these are often considered near-misses, and looking at them allows us to get a better picture of who the high-risk women really are,” Admon said.

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Researchers also weighed whether pre-existing or chronic health conditions such as asthma, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, kidney disease, HIV or AIDs, pulmonary hypertension, depression or substance abuse disorder had an effect on whether women were more likely to experience a dangerous complication. They found that women of racial and ethnic minority groups with multiple chronic health conditions were at highest risk for needing an emergency procedure to save their lives while hospitalized for childbirth.

“Women of color who have multiple health conditions before they have their baby appear to experience a ‘double whammy’ effect, which should force us to think about how to structure care to best serve these vulnerable women, not only during pregnancy but before and after giving birth too," Admon said in a news release.

Researchers concluded that if all women were to have the same outcomes as white women, it would result in roughly 8,100 fewer lifesaving medical procedures and 28 percent fewer severe health complications among racial and ethnic minority women. Black women would see the biggest improvement.

Contact Kristen Jordan Shamus: 313-222-5997 or kshamus@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @kristenshamus.