Photo: AFP
A charity who support those who miscarry has called for miscarriages to be recorded in a way that would provide national data, to help spot patterns or gain understanding of possible causes.
Miscarriage Matters chairperson Alicia Black said currently, there is a huge world-wide knowledge gap, because it is not recorded.
"If you had a miscarriage today, you would just basically be told it's most likely it was a natural chromosomal abnormality and next time it probably won't happen, which isn't very reassuring and it does kind of make you feel like you're supposed to just get on with it. So, you would have to wait until three consecutive miscarriages before you would be referred for testing to a specialist, and that's a lot of heartache that you have to go through before you get referred," Black said.
"When you do get referred, still then only 50 percent of the time will they find an answer as to why the miscarriage occurred. That's kind of the rationale as to why they don't offer it when you first have a miscarriage, but it doesn't really make sense to say, well, most of the time we won't find something, so we won't look."
Black said an example is that every newborn in Aotearoa is screened for hearing loss.
"We don't expect to find hearing loss in every newborn, but we recognise that it's important to screen for it. When the current attitude of miscarriage not being a medical event worthy of taking notice of means that we're not screening, we're letting down the people who are going to go on to have multiple miscarriages,"
Black said some countries like Norway, have taken action.
"They started recording miscarriage at a population level in 2008, and so things that we know from what they have been looking at is much more reliable than the other information that we get."
Black said the general opinion is that miscarriage increases with age, but the Norwegian study looked at more than 100,000 births and found it was almost a perfect bell curve, with 27 being the age you are least likely to have a miscarriage.
"Another thing that a study from Norway found was that in 2022 the World Health Organisation was recommending that couples wait six months before trying to get pregnant again, because they were saying that you had an increased risk of adverse outcomes if you did get pregnant within six months after a miscarriage or abortion," she said.
"But the Norwegian researchers looked at this and thought, well, it's not really based on very much data just because there is not very much data out there, so when they looked at it at a population level, what they found was that there was no increased risk getting pregnant again within three months after."
Black said it is important for Aotearoa to pay attention to baby loss as it is an important indication of health as a nation, as well as individuals being recognised that it is an important thing they're going through.
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