Residents' PapersDelayed postpartum preeclampsia: an experience of 151 cases
Section snippets
Material and methods
This was a multicenter retrospective analysis of patients who were delivered from January 1992 through December 2002. Participating hospitals included The University of Cincinnati, Good Samaritan Hospital (Cincinnati, Ohio), and Central Baptist Hospital (Lexington, Ky). Patients were identified through a perinatal database and ICD-9 codes. Inclusion criteria were women who were readmitted with a diagnosis of hypertension/preeclampsia (up to 6 weeks after delivery). Records were reviewed for
Results
During the study period, 3988 diagnoses of preeclampsia/eclampsia were made. Two hundred twenty-nine women (5.7%) were diagnosed during the postpartum period. Seventy-eight patients (34%) were diagnosed while still in the hospital, and 151 patients (66%) were readmitted to the hospital after the delivery with a diagnosis of hypertension/preeclampsia. The data analysis was confined to the patients who were readmitted with the diagnosis of hypertension/preeclampsia.
The mean maternal age at
Comment
Hypertensive disorders during pregnancy are the second leading cause, after embolism, of maternal death in the United States.2 During the past decades, there has been extensive research regarding the incidence, risk factors, antepartum treatment, and outcome of these women. Although the medical literature primarily focuses on antenatal and intrapartum treatment, hypertension in the postpartum period is a common phenomenon and often poses a treatment dilemma. It is recognized that the immediate
Acknowledgements
We thank Dr Mark Chames for help with the statistical portion of the paper.
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