Hepatitis C Rates Are Rising Among Pregnant Women

(CTN News) – There have been hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States due to the Hepatitis C opioid epidemic in the last two decades.

In recent years, new research has revealed another grim consequence of the American health crisis: a skyrocketing risk of hepatitis C infection in pregnant women.

Hepatitis C,

A liver infection spread through blood contact, is most commonly contracted through injection drugs.

Prevalence of HCV among pregnant women increased 16-fold between 1998 and 2018, researchers report, increasing the risk of preterm birth, poor fetal development, and fetal distress.

These statistics represent the broad picture among pregnant women of all ages. Over 3000% more people between the ages of 21 and 30 are at risk of contracting hepatitis C.

According to Dr. Po-Hung (Victor) Chen, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Comprehensive Transplant Center in Baltimore, the increase in HCV infections among pregnant women is concerning.

He said that even greater concern should be expressed that the study’s numbers suggest that U.S. obstetricians did not routinely screen all pregnant women for HCV during the study period.

As a result, Chen believes that our findings likely underestimated the true number of HCV infections among pregnant women in the United States.

A study conducted by Chen’s team examined data for more than 70 million women between the ages of 18 and 50 who were hospitalized between 1998 and 2018 due to giving birth to a child or to have a miscarriage.

Over 137,000 people tested positive for hepatitis C in the past year.

There were approximately three quarters of infected women who were white and about two thirds of them were younger than 31 years of age. There were nearly 3 in 10 people who reported using opioids in the past month.

There was a 16-fold increase in the number of pregnant women who tested positive for HCV at the end of the study period, according to researchers.

In that same timeframe, pregnant women between the ages of 41 and 50 also experienced an increase in the risk of contracting hepatitis C – by 300% – during that period.

The risk of HCV infection among the largest group of women – those between the ages of 21 and 30 – increased much more dramatically, increasing 31-fold (or roughly 3100%) in just a few years.

“These were not merely hypothetical or hypothetical risks,” Chen pointed out, but actual data that has been collected from U.S. women in recent years.

Even though Chen acknowledged that evidence of a link between opioid epidemic and HCV is “compelling,” she also conceded that this study does not definitively prove that the opioid crisis was directly responsible for the rise in HCV in pregnant women.

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