By Amy Norton
HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, May 21, 2020 (HealthDay News) — Some pregnant women with COVID-19 do become severely ill, and the risk may be elevated for those who were obese or had conditions like asthma before pregnancy, a new study suggests.
As with all things COVID-19, researchers have had limited information on whether pregnancy puts women at any greater risk of severe illness — or whether infection complicates pregnancy.
There is still a lot to learn, experts said. But the new study, reporting on 46 pregnant women in Washington state, begins to give some insight.
“The advance of this study is, we have over 40 women with symptomatic COVID-19, and we know what happened to them,” said senior researcher Dr. Kristina Adams Waldorf, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Most of the women had milder cases, but nearly 15% developed more severe breathing problems. All were hospitalized, and one woman who had asthma ended up in the intensive care unit.
In nearly all cases, the women were overweight or obese before pregnancy, and half had asthma or other conditions such as high blood pressure.
“So the same risk factors for severe COVID-19 that we’ve been seeing in non-pregnant people are also surfacing in the pregnant population,” Adams Waldorf said.
She and her colleagues reported on the cases May 18 in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.
Since the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, many pregnant women have been asking how the infection could affect them, according to Dr. Elizabeth Langen, who reviewed the findings. She specializes in high-risk maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Michigan’s Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital in Ann Arbor.
But doctors have had limited information to answer those questions — including whether the coronavirus carries any greater risk for pregnant women. With influenza, for example, it’s known that pregnant women are more likely than non-pregnant people to develop complications; and the infection can raise the risk of preterm l