Southeast Asian J Trop Med Public Health

In Bangladesh there is a dearth on information relating to complications during pregnancy. We followed up 1,019 pregnant women in rural Bangladesh sampled from all the 4 old administrative divisions of the country. Trained female interviewers visited households of the pregnant women at four-week intervals and interviewed them for their current pregnancy-related complications. Out of a total of 3,812 antepartum visits the percentage of reported symptoms of bleeding, fits and convulsions, excessive vomiting, fever >3 days, urinary problems, palpitations and symptomatic anemia were 0.3, 0.7, 1.4, 4.0, 26.8, 46.5 and 78.3 respectively. Morbidities were considered to cause a health burden if they imposed constraints in daily activities of the pregnant women and they were weighted according to intensity of the constraint. For each morbidity, the mean intensity of burden per episode and the population burden per 1,000 person months of observation of all the women were calculated. For common sustaining morbidities like symptomatic anemia and urinary problems the population burden was much heavier than that for more serious but rare morbidities like bleeding and convulsions. Among the visits in which the women had any symptoms, the percentages of care-seeking for less frequently reported morbidities such as fits and convulsions, bleeding, fever >3 days, excessive vomiting were about 74, 50, 34 and 33% respectively, whereas those for more commonly reported complications such as urinary problems, symptomatic anemia and palpitations were less than 20%. Care for these morbidities was mostly sought from untrained providers. Correspondence: Mahbub-E-Elahi Khan Chowdhury, Epidemiology Unit, Faculty of Medicine, Prince of Songkla University, Hat Yai 90110, Thailand. E-mail: [email protected] ANTEPARTUM MORBIDITIES IN BANGLADESH Vol 31 No. 3 September 2000 599 added a follow-up component with currently pregnant women to assess the level of their pregnancyrelated complications throughout the course of pregnancy. Duration of identification of pregnant women from the community for this study was SeptemberOctober 1992 and admission of subjects into the follow-up process was from October to December 1992. The objectives of this study were (1) to estimate the occurrence of symptoms of various antepartum morbidities during different trimesters of pregnancy, (2) to assess the health burden of the pregnant women due to those morbidities, (3) to find out the care-seeking behavior of the pregnant women for their reported symptoms of morbidities among a representative sample of rural Bangladeshi population.