What’s the risk of recurrent stillbirth?
Canadian obstetricians say their novel observations may be useful in counselling worried women
Among women who experience a stillbirth, almost 98% will never have another, a large cohort study shows.
The research defines the circumstances conferring greatest risk of recurrence, which is for women whose first birth is a small-for-gestational-age antepartum stillbirth and those whose first birth is an intrapartum stillbirth.
Most other women who have had a stillbirth can be reassured, with subsequent pregnancies regarded as “low risk”, the researchers suggest.
The obstetricians from the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, drew on data for more than 308,000 women and nearly 745,000 singleton births in the province between 1992 and 2017.
