Pregnant women could have a higher risk of getting into a motor vehicle accident. These crashes tend to require emergency medical care in the second trimester.
Crashes during this crucial period place both mother and baby at risk of "fetal death, chronic disability and complicated emergency medical care," a Canadian Medical Association Journal news release reported.
The study looked at 507, 262 pregnant women to see if pregnancy symptoms such as "nausea, fatigue, insomnia, and distraction" raised the risk of getting into a car accident and requiring emergency medical attention as a result.
The research team found in the three years before pregnancy the women experienced 6,922 crashes (about 177 per month). During the second trimester the women experienced 757 crashes, translating to about 252 per month.
The data suggests women in the middle stages of pregnancy have a 42 percent higher risk of car crash from the baseline.
"Pregnant women often worry about air flights, scuba diving, hot tubs and other topics in maternal health, yet individuals may overlook traffic crashes despite their greater health risks," lead author Doctor Donald Redelmeier, a researcher with the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) and a physician at the Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, said in the news release.
Statistics show that one out of every 50 pregnant women will be involved in a motor vehicle accident.
"The increase was almost fully explained by multiple-vehicle crashes in which the woman had been driving a car (not a truck or other miscellaneous vehicle) and had a high triage urgency," Doctor Jon Barrett, chief of maternal fetal medicine at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, with coauthors, said in the news release. . "Almost all traffic crashes could be prevented by a small change in driver [behavior]. The absolute risks among pregnant women, however, are still lower than among men of this age."
The team did not find similar results if pregnant women were pedestrians or passengers.
