BACKGROUND Maternal morbidity estimations are not based on well-documented methodologies and thus have limited validity for informing efforts to address the issue and improve maternal health. To fill this gap, maternal morbidity needs to be clearly defined, driving the development of tools and indicators to measure and monitor maternal health. This article describes the scoping exercise conduct...

BACKGROUND Ethiopia is one of the countries with the highest maternal mortality ratio 676/100,000 LB and the lowest skilled delivery at birth (10%) in 2011. Skilled delivery care and provision of emergency obstetric care prevents many of these deaths. Despite implementation of birth preparedness and complication readiness packages to antenatal care users since 2007 in the study area, yet an ove...

OBJECTIVE Heart failure (HF) is one of the most important complications in pregnant women with heart disease, causing maternal and fetal mortality and morbidity. METHODS This is an international observational registry of patients with structural heart disease during pregnancy. Sixty hospitals in 28 countries enrolled 1321 women between 2007 and 2011. Pregnant women with valvular heart disease...

OBJECTIVES To characterize maternal and fetal nitric oxide (NO) production in normal and abnormal pregnancy by measuring nitrate (NO3-) and nitrite (NO2-) metabolites in maternal venous blood, umbilical venous and arterial blood and amniotic fluid. METHODS This was a prospective cross-sectional study in 160 singleton pregnancies: 60 with one complication (infection, n = 37; gestational diabet...

BACKGROUND Identification of maternal and newborn illness and the decision-making and subsequent care-seeking patterns are poorly understood in Nepal. We aimed to characterize the process and factors influencing recognition of complications, the decision-making process, and care-seeking behavior among families and communities who experienced a maternal complication, death, neonatal illness, or ...

Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, particularly preeclampsia, eclampsia remain one the leading causes maternal morbidity and mortality worldwide. We studied association between risk factors, interventions required, diagnosis outcome in these patients admitted to Intensive Care Unit (ICU). : conducted a prospective, observational study after Institutional Scientific Ethics committee approval. ...

BACKGROUND The increased number of childbearing women with autoimmune diseases leads to a growing interest in studying relationship among maternal disease, therapy, pregnancy and off-spring. The aim of this study was to determine the impact of autoimmune disease on pregnancy and on neonatal outcome, taking into account the maternal treatment and the transplacental autoantibodies passage. METH...

BACKGROUND The incidence of severe maternal morbidity is increasing in high-income countries as a consequence, in part, of increased obstetric intervention and increasingly complex medical needs of women who become pregnant. Access to emergency obstetric care means that for the majority of women in these countries, an experience of severe maternal morbidity is unlikely to result in loss of life...

Introduction: The most common clinical complication of pregnancy is preeclampsia, that beside bleeding and infection, it is one of the  three main causes of pregnants maternal death around the world. Several studies suggest that some maternal factors such as prim gravids,elderly pregnancy, some occupations, previous high blood pressure, kidneys diseases, diabetes and some medical other diseases...

Preeclampsia (PE) is a severe complication of pregnancy associated with maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality. The underlying pathophysiology involves maternal systemic vascular and endothelial dysfunction associated with circulating antiangiogenic factors, although the specific etiology of the disease remains elusive. Our aim was to investigate the maternal endothelium in PE by exploring ...