Abstract
Objective Clinical research literature focuses primarily on the most common causes of maternal
morbidity and mortality (MMM). We explore sections of the discharge summaries of pregnant
or postpartum women admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) to identify associated
disorders and mine the literature to identify knowledge gaps in clinical research.
Methods Data for the study were discharge summaries in the MIMIC (Medical Information Mart
for Intensive Care) database. We extracted a control cohort to study if there is a
difference in comorbidities between pregnant and not pregnant patients with similar
reasons for admission. We identified comorbidities of the Unified Medical Language
System (UMLS) semantic types disease or syndrome, Mental or behavioral dysfunction,
and injury, or poisoning. We used Entrez programming utilities (E-utilities) to query
PubMed®.
Results We identified 246 pregnant and postpartum patients. A control group of 587 not pregnancy
related admissions matched on age and admit diagnosis. We found overlap of 24.3% discharge
diagnoses between the two groups, and 7.5% of the codes exclusively in the pregnancy
group. We identified 33 disease mentions not included in the most common reported
causes of MMM.
Conclusion Our results demonstrate that clinical text provides additional comorbidities associated
with maternal complications that need further clinical research.
Keywords
maternal morbidity - maternal mortality - puerperium - preventing maternal deaths
