Late estimation of gestational age in Burkina Faso: implications and solutions for reducing perinatal mortality
Creators: name: Ouattara, Cheick Ahmed
name: Compaoré, Anderson
name: Ouédraogo, Lionel Olivier
name: Ouédraogo, Moctar
name: Ouattara, Hermann
name: Coulibaly, Moussa
name: Dieng, Lishi
name: Nikiema, Zakari
name: Hanley-Cook, Giles T.
name: Argaw, Alemayehu
name: Huybregts, Lieven
name: Hadush, Kokeb Tesfamariam
name: Lachat, Carl
name: Toe, Laeticia Celine
name: Dailey-Chwalibóg, Trenton
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: Introduction:

In the management of pregnancy and childbirth, gestational age is crucial for assessing risks to the child and adopting the best management strategies. Limited access to ultrasound and late consultations lead to the use of alternative methods such as uterine height or Dubowitz birth score for estimating gestational age in resource-limited countries like Burkina Faso. The concordance and accuracy of these measures are not well established in Burkina Faso. This lack of clarity could lead to inadequate risk assessment during pregnancy and failure to identify vulnerable newborn infants, thus contributing to a high rate of neonatal mortality.

Methods:

We assessed the concordance of these alternative methods with the AMANHI method in a cohort of pregnant women in their second or third trimester in Bobo-Dioulasso, using the Bland-Altman method and the infraclass correlation coefficient.

Results:

A total of 768 pregnant women were included in our analysis. The graphs showed a lack of concordance between all other methods and the AMANHI method, with 95% limits of concordance ranging from -7.6 to +9.8 weeks. The prevalence of preterm birth was 2.9% using the AMANHI method. This prevalence ranged from 3.9 to 44.6% using alternative methods.

Conclusion:

The alternative methods evaluated in this study did not give results comparable to AMANHI, with discrepancies far from acceptable. This underlines the imperative not only to improve access to obstetrical ultrasound, but also to provide training in the use of the AMANHI method in the second and third trimesters for accurate assessment of gestational age in Burkina Faso.

Presented at:

The 5th Congo Gynecology and Obstetrics Conference; July 29th - 30th, 2024, Grand Hotel de Kintélé, Brazzaville, Congo; theme :"Improving women's, mother's, and childreen's health to meet Goal 3 of the Sustainable Development Goals".

Presenting Author:

Cheick Ahmed Ouattara, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D.

Agence de Formation de Recherche et d’Expertise en Santé pour l’Afrique

Bobo-Dioulasso, 298, Burkina Faso

Email: Ouattaracheickahmed@gmail.com
description: © Ouattara, et al., 2024. This document is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. We confirm that we have obtained permission to use data from the participants/patients/individuals included in this presentation. The data presented in this article are part of the DenBalo project, which is funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Fondation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of this work.