NCCDPHP Division of Reproductive Health Activities to Understand Stillbirth

CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP) Division of Reproductive Health is conducting research to learn more about stillbirth. Read about their efforts below.

Exploring Further Opportunities to Understand Stillbirth and its Effects

NCCDPHP’s Division of Reproductive Health collaborates with partners and monitoring systems to explore opportunities to research stillbirth and its effects on women and their families.   The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) collects a wealth of information from women who have had a live birth.  PRAMS is used to describe the experience of women and their babies before, during, and after pregnancy.  Expanding PRAMS to include women who have had a stillbirth would provide valuable information to both states and CDC by identifying groups of women who are at high risk for stillbirth, monitoring trends in risk factors and health care experiences over time, identifying areas for prevention, and monitoring progress towards goals in reducing stillbirth rates and reducing the differences in the rates between women from different racial/ethnic or socioeconomic groups.

The Division of Reproductive Health has collaborated with Emory University to examine the potential of creating a survey similar to the PRAMS questionnaires to expand the current body of knowledge surrounding pre-pregnancy and prenatal factors that might contribute to stillbirth.  This collaboration looked into appropriate methods to ask women about their experience with stillbirth, including the types of questions to ask women who had a stillbirth and the appropriate language to use when asking these questions. 

Notable Accomplishments of NCCDPHP Activities on Stillbirth

• Interviewed key stakeholders: Researchers conducted telephone interviews with parent advocacy leaders and in-depth face-to-face interviews with women who had experienced a stillbirth in the last 12 months. These interviews provided increased insight on best practices for designing appropriate questions in a questionnaire similar to PRAMS.
• Obtained expert input: In 2013, a panel of experts in stillbirth research and advocacy presented the findings of the telephone and in-person interviews and discussed the future direction for a PRAMS-like survey for stillbirth.
• Conducted pilot study of PRAMS-like survey: NCCDPHP led a pilot stillbirth questionnaire in Georgia and is planning to expand the pilot study to additional states in the near future.