The incidence of stillbirth is high in the United States and not improving, according to a new study published Monday.
Roughly one in 150 pregnancies (6.8 per 1,000) in the United States result in stillbirth, according to the study published in the medical journal JAMA, exceeding the previously reported CDC’s national estimates of about one in 175 (5.7 per 1,000) based on fetal death certificates gathered by states.
According to the study, of the more than 2.7 million pregnancies from 2016 to 2022 that were examined, 18,893 resulted in stillbirths, defined as fetal death at 20 weeks of gestation or later.
Researchers Jessica Cohen from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Mark Clapp from Massachusetts General Hospital, and others, highlight that although both data sources have imperfections—for instance, possible underreporting in death certificates or the exclusion of Medicaid-covered pregnancies—the key lesson from the study is that stillbirth rates are extremely high and have not improved. The NIH in 2023 wrote that it considered stillbirth rates to still be “unacceptably high.”…