AJG: Pregnant women with cirrhosis have higher rates of perinatal complications

Pregnancy in women with cirrhosis was previously thought to be uncommon because cirrhosis causes changes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis that can lead to amenorrhea and impaired fertility
.
In recent years, however, the incidence of pregnancy and childbirth in women with cirrhosis is increasing, which may be related to improved treatment of chronic liver disease and improved liver function and the dramatic increase in the number of young women now affected by nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD)

The researchers compared temporal trends in cirrhosis in pregnancy with non-cirrhotic chronic liver disease (CLD) or without CLD using discharge data from a national sample of inpatients in the United States of different ethnicities

The findings showed that of 18,573,000 women who gave birth from 2012 to 2016, 895 had cirrhosis, 119,875 had non-cirrhotic CLD, and 18,452,230 had no CLD
.
The pregnancy rate for cirrhosis increased from 2.

In this racially diverse study of the U.
S.
population, the authors found that the number of pregnancies with cirrhosis has more than doubled over the past decade
.
Cirrhosis increases the risk of some adverse events, although maternal and perinatal mortality is uncommon

Huang, Annsa.