Making pregnancy and childbirth safer

What are you researching?

“My objective as both a doctor and a researcher is to make pregnancy and childbirth safer for both mother and baby. We have a strong tradition with this in Sweden and a generally low level of risk for most pregnancies and deliveries. But for some patient groups, the risks are much higher, and our research focuses mainly on these women. We’re also researching which drugs are safe to take during pregnancy.”

What does your research actually involve?

“We mainly do epidemiological research based on national health registries, healthcare quality registries like the Pregnancy Register and data from digital medical records systems. In Sweden and Scandinavia, we’re uniquely well-equipped to do this kind of research. There are also better and better statistical methods that can help us make our registry data similar to randomised studies. The risk factors we’re studying include chronic diseases like diabetes and rheumatism, age of parents and obesity and bariatric surgery." 

"We’ve shown, for instance, that bariatric surgery generally entails much lower risks for both mother and baby than if the mother has not lost weight. In Sweden, more than 1,000 babies a year are born of women who have undergone such an operation, so I count that as one of our most important findings.”

What other discoveries have you made?

“Another important finding for many pregnant women is that antidepressant SSRI drugs are safe to take. I’m also proud of the fact that relatively early during the pandemic, we were able to elucidate the perinatal risks for babies of women who had COVID-19 while pregnant. There was considerable anxiety back then about this, and rather drastic measures were suggested, such as to induce childbirth prematurely, to advise against breastfeeding and to separate mother and baby after birth. We were able to show that for women with mild COVID-19 infection, the risks were so low that none of this was warranted.”