Pregnant Women Should Take Extra Care When Traveling In Cars.(prevention of fetal death due to traffic accidents)

2001 DEC 6 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Motor vehicle crashes involving pregnant women are the leading cause of traumatic fetal death, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Injury Research and Control (CIRCL) report in a recent journal article.

While they found the detected number of deaths to be disturbing, the researchers also suggest their data substantially underestimates the problem.

Based on their findings, the authors are urging automotive industry and highway transportation safety officials to urgently search for ways to reduce crash risks and improve the safety of pregnant women and their fetuses while driving or riding in motor vehicles.

The study was reported in the October 16, 2001, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"There is an urgent need to better understand how to protect pregnant women by reducing crash risk, and if they are in a crash, how to better protect women and fetuses," said Harold B. Weiss, MPH, PhD, associate director of CIRCL, assistant professor of neurological surgery and lead author of this study. "Furthermore, without better case identification, the magnitude and trends of the problem, who is at risk, and what circumstances carry the highest risk, remain difficult to decipher."

Researchers looked at 16 states' fetal death certificates from 1995 to 1997, representing 55% of the U.S. live births during the study, and approximately 15,000 fetal death registrations per year. Any fetal death of at least 20 weeks' gestation as a result of an in utero traumatic injury either to itself or mother was considered a case of traumatic fetal death. Out of the 240 traumatic fetal deaths identified from these records, motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of maternal injury related to the fetal death, representing 82% of the cases with listed causes.

This is the first population-based study that looks at all causes of traumatic fetal death. It supports the claim that the annual number of fetal motor vehicle-related deaths, conservatively estimated in this article at more than 369 (after partial adjustment for missed cases), far exceeds the number of infant motor vehicle-related deaths in the U.S., which averages about 180 deaths per year.