Authors : Donald S Christian, Hardika J Khanpara
DOI : 10.18231/j.jpmhh.2020.002
Volume : 6
Issue : 1
Year : 2020
Page No : 5-9
Background & Objective: The aim of this systematic review was to report pregnancy and its outcomes of
women who were affected by COVID-19 as pregnancy is known to be adversely affected by most of the
viral outbreaks of recent times and it is too early to rule out COVID-19 from the list.
Data Sources: Electronic search was made across popular databases such as PubMed and Google Scholar
with emphasize on keywords and their combinations keeping “COVID-19 and pregnancy” as a central
theme.
Study Eligibility Criteria: The major inclusion criteria for articles was that they must have data on
pregnant women who were tested positive for COVID-19 and they should have reasonable information
on the outcomes of the current pregnancy.
Study Appraisal and Synthesis Methods: Median age of the women, gestational age at delivery, Comorbidities,
events during current pregnancy, maternal and fetal complications, mode of delivery, birth
weight, APGAR scores of the neonate, neonatal outcome and COVID-19 test result of the neonate were the
information which were tried to compare from the selected articles.
Results: Eight articles were screened and finalized for the systematic review which belonged to China,
USA, UK and Singapore which in total had data for 185 pregnant women who were tested positive for
COVID-19 and had undergone delivery. Similarly, the median age of the pregnant women was 30 years
(29-33) and the median gestational of the women at the time of delivery was 36.75 (34-38) weeks. The
caesarean rates was typically higher across the articles, with mean of 77.45%. Fever, cough and shortness
of breath were the commonest presentations. The maternal and fetal complications were not significant.
The most of the results of neonatal testing for COVID-19 turned out to be negative. The rate of premature
births were highly variable.
Conclusion: The data thus far showed that the course of a COVID-19 pregnancy is much similar to a noninfected
one. However, the rates of premature births were found higher at several occasions and need to be
explored further. The possibilities of vertical transmission were almost nil. The outcomes of the pregnancies
were also comparable to uninfected ones.
Keywords: Corona virus, COVID-19, CoV-2 pregnancy, Neonatal outcomes, Pregnancy outcomes.