Health News

Epileptic Pregnant Women At Higher Risk Of Death, Study Suggests

Epileptic women are far more likely to die during pregnancy, a comprehensive new study suggests. The study, conducted by Sarah C. MacDonald and colleagues from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health uncovered that women with epilepsy had a 10-fold risk of death whilst delivering their babies when compared to mothers without epilepsy. Their findings have been published in JAMA Neurology.

According to MedPage Today, there are 80 deaths in every 100,000 pregnancies where an epileptic mother gives birth compared to 6 deaths per 100,000 pregnancies in non-epileptic mothers marking a startling contrast.

As well as the risk of death, epileptic women also run the risk of preeclampsia, pretern labour, seizures and stillbirth at an increased rate. Other concerns included poor fetus growth, postpartum hemorrhage and fetal abnormality.

The study altered many variables including race, mother’s age and economic circumstances but found that the variables did not alter or minimize the risks.

Medical News Today reports that 3 million American’s are diagnosed as epileptic with 150,000 cases diagnosed annually.

MacDonald notes that the “absolute risk” to pregnant woman remains “quite small” but that it is still necessary to update procedures to ensure a safer experience for epileptic mothers.

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.

The study focused on new mothers between 2007 and 2011 with MacDonald concluding that epileptic women need closer careful attention throughout pregnancy and during delivery.

The study brings to attention the need to “understand the risks of pregnancy in this population.”

With approximately half a million women with epilepsy of reproductive age in the US, and 25,000 offspring born to these women annually, there is considerable need to understand the risks of pregnancy in this population.

Click to comment
To Top

Hi - We Would Love To Keep In Touch

If you liked this article then please consider joing our mailing list to receive the latest news, updates and opportunities from our team.

We don't want an impostor using your email address so please look for an email from us and click the link to confirm your email address.