"Abstract
Design, Setting, and Participants: This serial cross-sectional study used nationwide data on births and pregnancy-related deaths from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Wide-Ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research. All pregnancy-related deaths among women aged 15 to 54 years from 2018 to 2022 were included.
Discussion
... [R]ates of pregnancy-related death increased by 27.7% in the US between 2018 and 2022, but there were nonmonotonic patterns, and the highest rate was in the year 2021. The increase was observed across age group with a disproportionate increase of 36.8% among women aged 25 to 39 years. If the nation had achieved the lowest state rate estimated here, 2679 pregnancy-related deaths could have been prevented during the study period. Additionally, the pregnancy-related death rate was 3.8 times higher among American Indian and Alaska Native women and 2.8 times higher among non-Hispanic Black women compared with the rate among non-Hispanic White women. Although cardiovascular disease was the leading cause of the overall pregnancy-related death, cancer, drug-induced and alcohol-induced death, and mental and behavior disorders are important contributing causes of late maternal death."
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY License. © 2025 Chen Y et al. JAMA Network Open.