©
StockSnap
The study, co-authored by researchers at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, is the first to calculate the lifetime risk of maternal near miss for 40 countries spanning Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America from 2010 onwards.
A ‘maternal near miss’ is defined as a woman who survived, but almost died from a life-threatening complication of pregnancy and childbirth. The World Health Organization (WHO) identifies cases of maternal near misses using clinical, laboratory, and lifesaving intervention-based criteria of organ dysfunction such as blood transfusion or emergency hysterectomy.
This novel study provides a cross-country comparison of the likelihood that a female individual aged 15 years will experience a maternal near miss before the age of 50, given the prevalence of maternal near miss morbidity, fertility, and mortality levels in each country for a specific year.
The lifetime risk of maternal near miss is one in 20 or higher in nine countries, seven of which are in sub-Saharan Africa. The highest risk is one in six in Guatemala (2016) which is almost 45 times higher than the lowest risk of one in 269 in Vietnam (2010).
Read the full story on the University of Oxford website.