COVID-19 and Pregnancy

By Jane Farrell

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is launching a study to examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic during and after pregnancy, the agency said.

In a news release, the NIH said that researchers in the study will analyze the medical records of up to 21,000 women to evaluate whether changes to healthcare delivery that were implemented as a result of the pandemic have led to higher rates of pregnancy-related complications and cesarean delivery.

Additionally, the NIH said, researchers will seek to establish the risk of pregnant women with COVID-19 infection transmitting the virus to the hospital.

Have changes to health care because of COVID-19 affected mothers and babies?

And 1,500 women who were confirmed with COVID-19 will have their health monitored six weeks after childbirth.

The investigation will be conducted by researchers in the Maternal-Fetal Medicine Units (MFMU) Network, a group of 12 U.S. clinical centers funded by NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

MFMU Network sites cover more than 160,000 deliveries a year. The NIH said in its release that the centers’ racial, ethnic, and geographic diversity allows researchers to generalize their study findings to the U.S. population.

MFMU Network investigators plan to contribute data collected from the current study to a larger registry to help inform future studies of how COVID-eu19 affects maternal health and pregnancy.

For more on children’s health, click here to visit the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. For the latest information from the federal government on the COVID-19 pandemic, click here.