Original reportAdverse Outcomes in Pregnancies of Asthmatic Women: Results from a Canadian Population
Introduction
Asthma is a leading cause of morbidity in both children and adults. In the last two decades, there has been a rise in the incidence of asthma in both developed and developing countries. Asthma is also the most frequent respiratory disorder complicating pregnancy, affecting about 0.4–1.3% of pregnant women 1, 2, 3.
Despite the intensive investigation for the causes of asthma in children and adults, there has been little attention paid to asthma complicating pregnancy 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Our investigation examined the influence of asthma on the adverse complications of pregnancy in a group of more than two million of Canadian pregnant women.
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Methods
We used hospital admission and separation records collected by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) for fiscal years 1989/90 to 1995/96. Data for women admitted to the hospital for obstetric delivery were abstracted by case-mix group codes defining these deliveries. CIHI uses both surgical and medical partitioning to define major clinical categories. The case-mix group codes generated by CIHI for obstetric deliveries were 502–507 for fiscal year 1989/90, 600–604 for fiscal years
Results
During the seven years of study, 2,017,553 obstetric deliveries were reported to CIHI. Overall prevalence of a discharge diagnosis of asthma among these Canadian mothers were 0.43%, yielding a total of 8672 cases of asthmatic mothers. The prevalence of asthma increased steadily from 0.32% in fiscal year 1989 to 0.45% in fiscal year 1995. Asthmatic mothers tend to be younger and to have higher rates of various adverse pregnancy outcomes than control mothers (Table 1).
Maternal asthma was
Discussion
In this historical cohort study of a large Canadian population, we replicated the associations between maternal asthma and various adverse pregnancy outcomes observed in a previous study in the State of New Jersey (4). The New Jersey study was also population-based, with a prevalence of asthma of 0.51% (4). The similarity in results obtained from two different populations demonstrates the robust of the association between maternal asthma and adverse pregnancy outcomes.
There are several
Acknowledgements
This study was carried out under the auspices of the Canadian Perinatal Surveillance System. The authors thank Dr. George G. Rhoads for helpful comments.
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