Q2. What were the common causes of admission to intensive care?
Severe haemorrhage, severe pre-eclampsia including HELLP syndrome and eclampsia and severe sepsis were the three complications most consistently reported in previous studies as causes of admission to intensive care (1,6-9).
Q3. What was the common of the three conditions the authors studied?
Severe haemorrhage was the most common of the three conditions the authors studied, but its incidence varied widely between European countries.
Q4. What is the common cause of maternal death in the United States?
Haemorrhage is reported to be the leading cause of maternal death in Japan and Europe as a whole and the third most common cause in the United States (25-29).
Q5. What are the main causes of maternal mortality in the European countries?
They were also with thromboembolic disease the leading causes of maternal mortality reported in national surveys (10-12) and are a significant public health problem, especially in developed countries.
Q6. How many women were admitted to an intensive care unit?
In its use of common definitions and methods of data collection on a population basis, this study was an advance on studies that used admission to an intensive care unit as a proxy measure of acute severe maternal morbidity.
Q7. What countries had the highest reported incidence of morbidity associated with the three selected conditions?
The three countries with the highest reported incidence of morbidity associated with the three selected conditions were Belgium,Zhang Page 10 31/07/2012Finland and the United Kingdom.
Q8. What was the purpose of the European concerted actions on obstructing maternal mor?
The European concerted actions on ‘MOthers Mortality and Severe morbidity’ (MOMS) aimed to overcome these problems by using common definitions and collecting populationbased data.
Q9. How many women had severe obstetric conditions?
The study identified 1734 women with at least one of the three conditions, with 847 experiencing severe haemorrhage, 793 experiencing severe pre-eclampsia and 142 experiencing severe sepsis.
Q10. How were the deaths excluded from the study?
To ensure that no deaths associated with the conditions studied were excluded, data were also collected about all maternal deaths in each region.
Q11. How many deaths were recorded in the former South East Region of the United Kingdom during the study period?
A further five deaths were recorded in the former South East Region of the United Kingdom during the study period, but because of the constraints under which the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths in the United Kingdom operates, details about them were not made available to their study (17).
Q12. What could be the reason for the low incidence rate of the three conditions?
It could also be that maternal mortality is more closely associated with the quality of care provided than with the prevalence of morbidity (34-35).
Q13. What is the relationship between the differences observed between regions?
In their study, it is likely that despite concerted unequivocal definitions, the differencesZhang Page 11 31/07/2012in rates observed between regions are partly related to ascertainment differences.