Adverse pregnancy outcomes including gestational diabetes and preeclampsia: Do primary care physicians refer to them in their medical files?

Abstract

Aims: Pregnancies complicated with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) or preeclampsia should be considered risk factors for subsequent morbidity later in a women’s life. Appropriate screening tests have been recommended for these women. We sought to evaluate whether primary care physicians document diagnoses of GDM or preeclampsia in the medical files during the post-partum period and to elicit whether appropriate screening tests were performed.

Materials and methods: The medical records of 352 women discharged from the maternity ward with a diagnosis of GDM or preeclampsia were examined 12 weeks post-partum. We recorded whether a primary care visit occurred, if a relevant diagnosis was documented and if screening tests were conducted.

Results: In our cohort, 89.2% of the GDM group and 81.0% of the preeclampsia group visited a primary care physician at least once. About 12.9% (n = 25) of the GDM group and 12.7% (n = 20) of the preeclampsia group were given a correct diagnosis; 40.7% of the GDM group underwent a diabetes screening test and 27.8% of the preeclampsia group underwent a blood pressure measurement.

Conclusion: We concluded that diagnoses of GDM and pre-eclampsia are not well-documented by primary physicians and that recommended screening tests are not being sufficiently performed.

Keywords:

• Adverse pregnancy outcomes
• primary care physician
• gestational diabetes
• preeclampsia
• post-partum screening

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Data availability statement

Due to IRB terms supporting data not provided.

Author contributions

The first three authors equally contributed to the manuscript. Conceptualization: E. S. and H. T.; formal analysis: N. A., T. F., and K. H.; methodology: E. S., H. T., N. A., and T. F.; project administration: E. S. and H. T.; software: N. A., K. H., and T. F.; supervision: E. S. and H. T.; writing – original draft, N. A.; writing – review and editing, N. A., E. S., H. T., and K. H. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no external funding.