>Pregnant woman goes into labor at 22 weeks, hospital tells her she has no hope, she drives 7 miles to another hospital she finds on facebook and now she has a healthy four year old. Comments have a lot of other ‘the doctors told us our child would never survive, but then we got a second opinion and they did anyway’ stories.
At 22 weeks, premature delivery without intensive support has a survival rate of about 0%.
A study analyzing data from 2020 to 2022 across 636 U.S. hospitals reported that among infants born at 22 weeks who received postnatal life support, 35.4% survived to hospital discharge. However, survival without severe complications was notably lower, at 6.3%.
>Conclusions: Survival ranged from 24.9% at 22 weeks to 82.1% at 25 weeks, with low proportions of infants surviving without complications, prolonged lengths of hospital stay, and frequent technology dependence at all gestational ages.
When talking complications, severe is not an understatement. Long-term cognitive impairment occurs in the vast majority of cases, and is crippling more often than not.
I think it’s ill-advised to pick this particularly case as an example of doctors giving poor or inadequate advice. It’s entirely possible that the hospital didn’t have the facilities for the level of intensive care a pre-term delivery at 22 weeks demanded.
The woman, and her daughter, were enormously lucky. I’m not an OB-gyn, but if I were in their shoes I would strongly counsel against attempting delivery and resuscitation. Of course, I respect patient autonomy enough that I would have gone ahead if the patient truly understood the risks involved, but without the benefit of hindsight I wouldn’t think it was in the best interest of the child.
>Pregnant woman goes into labor at 22 weeks, hospital tells her she has no hope, she drives 7 miles to another hospital she finds on facebook and now she has a healthy four year old. Comments have a lot of other ‘the doctors told us our child would never survive, but then we got a second opinion and they did anyway’ stories.
At 22 weeks, premature delivery without intensive support has a survival rate of about 0%.
A study analyzing data from 2020 to 2022 across 636 U.S. hospitals reported that among infants born at 22 weeks who received postnatal life support, 35.4% survived to hospital discharge. However, survival without severe complications was notably lower, at 6.3%.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39323403/
>Conclusions: Survival ranged from 24.9% at 22 weeks to 82.1% at 25 weeks, with low proportions of infants surviving without complications, prolonged lengths of hospital stay, and frequent technology dependence at all gestational ages.
When talking complications, severe is not an understatement. Long-term cognitive impairment occurs in the vast majority of cases, and is crippling more often than not.
I think it’s ill-advised to pick this particularly case as an example of doctors giving poor or inadequate advice. It’s entirely possible that the hospital didn’t have the facilities for the level of intensive care a pre-term delivery at 22 weeks demanded.
The woman, and her daughter, were enormously lucky. I’m not an OB-gyn, but if I were in their shoes I would strongly counsel against attempting delivery and resuscitation. Of course, I respect patient autonomy enough that I would have gone ahead if the patient truly understood the risks involved, but without the benefit of hindsight I wouldn’t think it was in the best interest of the child.