A team at the University of Edinburgh released a paper in Nature Medicine suggesting that women infected with COVID-19 may be at risk of complications during pregnancy.
The researchers scoured through the health data of 87,000 women who had entered gestation between December 2020 and October 2021, during the active phases of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
“We describe COVID-19 vaccine uptake and SARS-CoV-2 infection in pregnant women in Scotland, using whole-population data from a national, prospective cohort,” said Sarah Stock and her colleagues in the journal article.
“We found that severe complications known to be associated with COVID-19 in pregnancy (critical care admission and perinatal mortality) were more common in women who were unvaccinated at the time of COVID-19 diagnosis than in vaccinated pregnant women.”
The findings point to the urgency for vaccination during pregnancy to avoid adverse outcomes pertaining to the coronavirus.
“Our findings emphasize the need for continued efforts to increase vaccination uptake in pregnant women, especially in younger and more deprived populations,” the authors stressed in their findings.
