This review summarizes the epidemiology and incidence rates of pregnancy-associated venous thromboembolism in developed countries over the past 35 years.
What is the incidence rate of venous thromboembolism associated with pregnancy in developed countries?
This review provides an updated epidemiological overview of the absolute risk and incidence rates of pregnancy-associated VTE in developed countries.
This review is focused on the epidemiology of venous thromboembolism (VTE), including deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE), associated with pregnancy. Superficial vein thrombosis, a less hazardous and less studied type of thrombosis in pregnant women, is beyond the scope of this review. This study discusses the VTE incidence rate in women from developed countries for both antepartum and postpartum periods and for subpopulations of women affected by additional risk factors, such as thrombophilias, circulatory diseases, preeclampsia of varying degrees of severity, and Caesarean section. To minimize bias due to historical changes in medical and obstetric practices, lifestyle, diet, etc., this review is generally limited to relatively recent studies, i.e., those that cover the last 35 years. The absolute risk or incidence rate was used to ascertain risk of VTE associated with pregnancy. For the studies where the direct incidence rates of VTE were not reported, we calculated an estimate of the observed but not reported absolute incidence rates using the data presented in respective articles.
Parunov et al. (Tue,) conducted a review in Venous thromboembolism (VTE) associated with pregnancy. This review summarizes the epidemiology and incidence rates of pregnancy-associated venous thromboembolism in developed countries over the past 35 years.