Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System (PMSS) data from 2012-2022 were analyzed for this descriptive study. Specific subclassifications of deaths within the PMSS category of "other noncardiovascular medical conditions" (OMC) were analyzed by sociodemographic characteristics, and pregnancy-related mortality ratios (PRMRs; pregnancy-related deaths/100,000 live births) were calculated within each subclassification. Prepandemic (2012-2019) and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (2020-2022) time periods are reported separately. The overall OMC-specific PRMR was 2.20 (95% CI, 2.06-2.35). Epilepsy was the most frequent specific subclassification of pregnancy-related OMC deaths before (15.7%) and during (16.1%) the COVID-19 pandemic. Diabetes (10.7%) and asthma (10.1%) followed epilepsy prepandemic, and asthma (13.1%) and diabetes (10.2%) followed during the pandemic. Reporting subclassifications of pregnancy-related deaths improves the ability to focus attention and interventions on these less frequently occurring consistent causes of pregnancy-related death.
Njie et al. (Thu,) studied this question.