Abstract

LAURENTI, Ruy; JORGE, Maria Helena Prado de Mello  and  GOTLIEB, Sabina Léa Davidson. Maternal deaths in Brazil: An analyses of related variable in death certificates. Inf. Epidemiol. Sus [online]. 2000, vol.9, n.1, pp.43-50. ISSN 0104-1673.  http://dx.doi.org/10.5123/S0104-16732000000100004.

Maternal mortality data is a matter of concern in Public Health. It is well known that causes of death related to pregnancy, childbirth and puerperium are perhaps the worst reported for death certificate (DC) records. Looking to improve the quality of these data, the Ministry of Health (MH) introduced an item in DC records, to be filled out by physicians, indicating whether or not the deceased was pregnant at the moment of death or during the period 12 months prior to death. The objective of this paper is to evaluate these items in Brazilian DC records for 1996 and 1997. In these years, respectively, and "unknown" response was present in 89.3% and 87.4% of the DC for the question of whether or not the deceased was pregnant at the time of death, and 91.4% and 90.4% for the question of whether or not the deceased had been pregnant at any time during the 12 months prior to death. These values represent a real need for improvement in gathering data. Among those DC's with a positive response as to the presence of pregnancy, only 19.4% and 38.1% of the deaths were attributed to maternal causes in 1996 values considered to be low. Information related to pregnancy was obtained in 30.7% and 45.3% of the records attributed to maternal causes (Capter XV of ICD-10) in 1996 and 1997, respectively. Considering the high frequency of "unknown" as a response and the items' obscureness, it is proposed to the MH to revise the question and to reinforce the importance of adequate reporting in filling out DC's by physicians.

Keywords : Death Certificate; Evaluation of the Death Information System; Maternal Mortality.

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