Pregnant women with sickle cell disease have a higher risk of death according to a new study.
- Maternal mortality is the death of a woman during pregnancy, childbirth or shortly after childbirth.
- According to the WHO, it is still very high, with around 830 women dying every day worldwide.
Sickle cell disease affects around 300,000 births a year worldwide, according to National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm). This very common genetic disease, also called sickle cell anemia, affects hemoglobin, the main protein in red blood cells. Thus, people who have it can suffer anemia (an abnormally low level of hemoglobin in the blood), painful crises and have a higher risk of infections.
Pregnant women more at risk of dying from sickle cell disease
Currently, there is no curative treatment for this pathology, the only solutions offered to patients can increase their life expectancy, but this is still limited. And, according to a new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open, this would be even more the case for pregnant women with sickle cell disease. These would have a higher risk of mortality than future mothers who do not suffer from this disease.
“There is a lack of research and care for people with sickle cell disease, which they desperately need, Lydia Pecker, one of the authors, in a communicated. Pregnant women with [de cette maladie] are even more disadvantaged.”
Among the data collected between 2012 and 2018 and studied by the researchers, there were 5,401,899 deliveries, including 742,164 among black women and 3,901 among future mothers with sickle cell disease. 84% of these were black women.
The scientific delay on sickle cell disease due to racism
Result: the maternal mortality rate of women with sickle cell disease was 26 times higher than that of non-black women who were not sick and 10 times higher than that of black women not affected by this pathology. Thus, compared to all pregnant women, those with sickle cell disease were more likely to die when they were expecting a child or had just given birth.
According to the authors, although medical progress has been made, maternal mortality rates for these women have not improved for several years. They plead for the management of these patients to improve. They point in particular to the needs of “more interventions, including increased blood transfusions and more frequent ultrasounds to assess the condition of the fetus,“explains Ahizechukwu Eke, one of the authors.
According to scientists, in the United States, racism could partly explain the delay of medicine for this pathology because 90% of people with sickle cell disease are black and 84% of pregnant women with this disease are black. “It must also be understood that it is a racial disparity in access to health care because the delays [scientifiques] in research and care for sickle cell disease in the United States are also consequences of structural racism”, conclude the authors.
