One Doctor's
Opinion
Test Leads to
Needless C-section
By Alex Friedman,
maternal-fetal medicine at the Hospital of the University of
Pennsylvania
Apr. 26, 2010
My patient needed to be delivered. She had just developed eclampsia,
a potentially fatal disease that afflicts women in the second half
of pregnancy. She had suffered a seizure and dangerously high blood
pressure, and was at risk for far worse, including a stroke. No one
knows why this condition arises, but delivery sure clears it up in a
hurry.
So we gave medication to start labor, and the nurses placed a fetal
heart monitor.
Worn like a belt, but higher on the abdomen, the ultrasound monitor
would play a crucial role in the hours to come. It prints a read-out
strip of the baby's heart rate, and the pattern would guide us in
determining whether the delivery would be natural or through
cesarean section.
As I suspected, the baby's heart-rate strip showed worrisome changes
soon after labor began, and I knew it would get worse as labor
progressed. We would fight through the night to have a natural
delivery. But ultimately that single heart-rate test, which is
surprisingly unreliable, would be a key factor in whether my patient
would get a C-section or not.
Nearly all American mothers are monitored during labor, and bad
fetal heart strips are an important cause of high cesarean section
rates. A recent report detailed the dizzying increases: Almost one
in three babies was delivered by cesarean in 2007, the most recent
year for which data are available. That rate has grown by more than
50 percent in a decade.
I have performed hundreds of cesarean sections during residency, and
many were the result of bad heart-rate strips.
A jagged pattern indicating increases in the heart rate reassures us
that the baby's brain is awake and alert, and that labor could
continue. But a flat line or decreases in the heart rate after
contractions make us think the baby is not getting enough oxygen and
pushes us to do a C-section - delivering the baby through incisions
in the abdominal wall and the uterus.
For the worst readings, we believed every second counted and rushed
the surgery: If the baby wasn't delivered one minute from the first
incision into the skin, we had moved too slowly.
The complication we feared most was hypoxia, the baby not getting
enough oxygen during labor. Going too long without adequate oxygen
could result in a serious permanent injury, such as cerebral palsy,
or even death.
No test is perfect. But almost every time we whisked a mother back
to the operating room, and I cut through skin, fat, fascia, and
finally the muscle of the uterus, expecting a blue, floppy baby, the
child I delivered emerged pink, healthy, and a little bit angry.
Were we saving lives and averting disaster? Or were we performing
unnecessary surgery?
Fetal heart-rate monitoring is a screening test. Good tests get
several things right; they are cheap, detect a possible problem when
there is still time to act, and minimize unnecessary follow-up
tests.
The Pap smear is an excellent screening test: By examining a few
cells brushed from the cervix - where the vagina opens into the
uterus - doctors catch precancerous changes - or even early cancer -
when it is easy to treat.
But fetal heart monitoring is an appallingly poor test. The test
misses the majority of babies with cerebral palsy, the condition
researchers hoped it would prevent. It causes increased rates of a
painful and invasive surgery: cesarean section. Even worse, almost
all women undergo continuous heart monitoring during labor, not just
those at highest risk.
The odds of my patient's baby suffering from dangerous lack of
oxygen were slim. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine
found that only 1 of 500 babies with a bad strip had cerebral palsy.
Moreover, it remained unclear if the condition had developed before
labor, in which case cesarean couldn't prevent it.
A 2006 analysis by the British Cochrane Collaboration, evaluating
all available research, found that fetal heart monitoring failed to
reduce perinatal mortality - the risk of a baby's dying late in
pregnancy, during birth, or shortly after birth - and increased
cesarean section rates and forceps deliveries, compared with
listening to a baby's heart rate intermittently.
As a medical student, I loved watching emergency cesarean sections.
The baby's heart rate went down, doors swung open, residents rushed
the patient down to the OR, and a frantic minute or two of surgery
later, a screaming baby was out. The excitement pushed me to choose
a career in obstetrics. I never questioned the need for the surgery.
Now, cesarean sections for bad tracings are one of the least
satisfying parts of my job.
Steven Clark and Gary Hankins, two prominent obstetricians, voiced
my frustration. "A test leading to an unnecessary major abdominal
operation in more than 99.5 percent of cases should be regarded by
the medical community as absurd at best," they wrote in the American
Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. "Electronic fetal heart rate
monitoring has probably done more harm than good."
Why do doctors cling to continuous fetal heart monitoring? An
obstetrician will most likely point to the fear of being sued, but
the complete answer is more complex. Our medical culture prizes
technology and tests, even if they don't work and can cause harm.
"It's our bias that anything that can be quantified is an
improvement," said H. Gilbert Welch, a professor at Dartmouth
Medical School whose research focuses on harm caused by screening
and over-diagnosis.
"I think we get in trouble when we start promising things to . . .
well [patients]," Welch said in an interview. "It is not that hard
to make them worse."
For three or four hours that night, I struggled with my patient's
bad fetal heart strip. I wanted her to avoid a cesarean section. She
had type 1 diabetes, and I expected her sugars to swing wildly after
surgery, and her recovery to be slow.
To improve the strip, the nurses and I tried giving her oxygen,
changing her position in the bed, even rubbing the baby's head
through the cervix to wake it up.
Finally, at 3 a.m., I felt compelled to recommend cesarean. The
strip continued to look bad, and my patient's labor progressed
slowly.
We went to the operating room, and delivered the baby by cesarean.
My patient's child greeted the world pink and well-oxygenated.
The test was wrong again.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alex Friedman is a fellow in maternal-fetal medicine at the Hospital
of the University of Pennsylvania.
For The Philadelphia Inquirer
'Behold, I will bring them from the north country, And gather them
from the ends of the earth,
Among them the blind and the lame,
The woman with child and The one who labors with child, together,
A
great throng shall return there...And My people shall be satisfied with My goodness, says the LORD.'
Jeremiah 31:8, 14
~~~
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