Effect of motor vehicle crashes on adverse fetal outcomes☆
Section snippets
Materials and methods
The population-based state databases for this project included Utah police-reported motor vehicle crash records, birth certificates, and fetal death certificates for the years 1992–1999. This study period was chosen because of the availability of each of the statewide databases for these years. The University of Utah Institutional Review Board approved the use of each of these databases for this project.
The 1992–1999 motor vehicle crash records were obtained from the Utah Department of
Results
From 1992 to 1999 there were 322,704 singleton live births recorded among Utah residents. Of these, 8938 (2.8%) were linked to a motor vehicle crash during pregnancy. There were some statistically significant differences between pregnant women in crashes and pregnant women not in crashes, although these differences could be attributed more to large sample sizes than to important epidemiological differences (Table 1). Compared with women not involved in a motor vehicle crash during pregnancy,
Discussion
In this study, the pregnancy outcomes of mothers involved in motor vehicle crashes were compared with those of mothers not involved in crashes. The main findings are that nearly 3% of births linked to motor vehicle crashes during pregnancy, that pregnant women in crashes in which the mother wore her seatbelt were not significantly more at risk for adverse fetal outcomes than pregnant women not in crashes, and that pregnant women who did not wear their seatbelts during a crash were more likely
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Partially supported by Health Resources and Services Administration, Maternal and Child Health Bureau, cooperative agreement no. U93 MC00216; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, cooperative agreement no. DTNH22-00-H-67012; and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention center grant no. CR310285.