A new study by researchers at King’s College London has established that indoor air pollution from wood or charcoal “could have life-threatening consequences for some pregnant women.”
The study, seen by The Kenya Times, suggests that there is close connection between “deaths attributable to toxic smoke from cooking and heating and the rate of eclampsia, a rare condition in pregnancy where high blood pressure results in life-threatening seizures.”
“Women with pre-eclampsia, characterised by high blood pressure or hypertension, are at significantly greater risk in pregnancy if they are cooking over an open fire,” Saeed Dehghan observes.
According to the study, published in the International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics, “solid-fuel fires inside homes, commonplace in low and middle-income countries, also exacerbate the risk of placental hypoxia, when the foetus’s oxygen supply is affected.”
The research, according to Prof Andrew Shennan, a lead author of the study, “could help explain observed inequalities in maternal healthcare in low and middle-income countries”.
Researchers sampled at least 2,692 cases of eclampsia in 536,223 deliveries in Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
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Shennan, notes, “In-house cooking and household pollution may increase the risk of seizures. We believe that less oxygen will get to the mother’s brain, and this may trigger a fit in women who already have pre-eclampsia.”
“We are lucky to have such a large dataset of women with eclampsia, as it only occurs in one per cent of women with pre-eclampsia. This has allowed us to uncover this new finding…this could help explain observed inequalities in maternal healthcare in low and middle-income countries,” he added.
Researchers established in a previous study conducted by the same institution that: “94 per cent of maternal deaths occur in low and middle-income countries, with 22 per cent due to high blood pressure disorders such as eclampsia.”
