C-section rate soars by 154% over 25 years
CAESAREAN sections have soared in Dublin’s two biggest maternity hospitals by 154% over the last 25 years – and they are forecast to continue to escalate.
This is despite the greater risk to the mother of complications associated with the procedure, including the toll taken on the woman’s body. However, experts point out that among the reasons for the growing number of caesarean sections is because they have become safer.
Professor Michael Turner, UCD professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Coombe Hospital, said increased likelihood of successive C-sections among mothers was expected to continue to drive rates up. He added: ‘The risks of complications are higher [with C-sections] than they are with a vaginal birth. It also has long-term implications in that you’ve had major surgery and it complicates the risk of any future abdominal surgery.’
The figures rose at a much higher rate among Dublin mothers than their counterparts in Germany and the US over the last quarter of a century. This coincides with a sharp rise in mothers in the Coombe Women and Infants University Hospital and the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street having repeat C-sections, with only one in three opting for a natural birth after a C-section with their first baby.
Prof. Turner said there was also a financial cost as women have much longer stays in hospital after the procedure. The key finding was that while two out of three women in those hospitals opted for a vaginal delivery after having a C-section with their first birth in 1990, the rate halved to one in three by 2014.
‘The biggest change we’ve had is the operation [C-section] has become much safer and the threshold for doing a caesarean section is lower,’ said Prof Turner. ‘I would be in favour of... a vaginal delivery but there are certain circumstances where it is in the mother’s or the baby’s interest to do a caesarean section... but the challenge of the escalating rates is that nobody knows the optimum caesarean section rate for Ireland.’
The study, Recent Trends in Vaginal Birth After Caesarean Section, was carried out by the ESRI and the UCD Centre for Human Reproduction at the Coombe.