Most hospital deliveries have something on the chart
In a CDC study of nearly 6.9 million US hospital deliveries, about two in three had at least one of 34 listed conditions.
If you are waiting to find out whether your pregnancy is going to be one of the straightforward ones, here is the honest background.
CDC researchers looked at 6,892,304 hospital deliveries in the United States in 2018 and 2019. They built a list of 34 groups of conditions from the diagnosis codes on each record. Then they counted.
Broken down: 29.6% had exactly one condition group recorded, 18.2% had two, and 17.7% had three or more. The authors put it this way: Approximately two of three delivery hospitalizations had at least one condition group documented, many associated with adverse maternal outcomes.
The five most often recorded were anemia (19.5%, 1,346,940 deliveries), substance use (12.5%, 858,590), high blood pressure disorders of pregnancy (12.5%, 864,665), obesity (12.0%, 824,285) and mental health conditions (8.8%, 609,325).
Two more limits worth holding. The denominator is hospital deliveries, so every pregnancy that ended before 20 weeks is absent, and so is every birth outside a hospital. And the study measures documentation, not disease. The authors write that coding practices vary across facilities and states, which may lead to overestimation or underestimation.
The share with at least one condition group also varied by race and ethnicity, from 61.3% among Asian or Pacific Islander patients to 74.9% among Native American patients, with Black patients at 73.4%, White at 65.3% and Hispanic at 61.9%. Three or more condition groups were recorded for 25.4% of Native American and 25.1% of Black patients.
What this number is good for. Not for predicting your pregnancy. For showing you that arriving at a birth with an entirely blank chart is the unusual case, not the standard you failed to meet.
"Two out of three women arrive at delivery with something on the chart. Is what I have on mine the kind of thing that changes my care, or the kind that just gets recorded?"