Antenatal and prepregnancy care – prevention of perinatal morbidity and mortality

Pregnancy and childbirth remain the most important events for the survival of mankind. With advances in technology and improvements in lifestyle, mortality from pregnancy has fallen in the more resource rich countries although this unfortunately cannot be said for some of the low income countries with some having as many as one in six women dying from pregnancy and childbirth. It is therefore an inevitable progression that greater emphasis should move from dealing with complications to prevention, early identification and timely interventions. This philosophy has driven most advances in antenatal care. Indeed such significant progress has been made in screening that in some of the more advanced societies, those classified as low risk receive most of their antenatal care in the community. Despite this progress, significant challenges remain with the reliability of various predictive models of pregnancies that require specialized care. Additionally, survival of the at-risk mother and fetus once identified continues to be challenging.

In this themed issue of the journal dedicated to antenatal care, experts address various aspects of antenatal care starting with arguments about shifting the foundation of prevention to the pre-pregnancy period through providing information that could be used to counsel couples with recurrent pregnancy loss on prevention and outcome to prediction of fetuses at risk of significant perinatal morbidity and mortality using various modeling approaches.

Other information

Published in: Journal of Perinatal Medicine
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
See article on publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jpm-2018-0275