A new population-based study published in JAMA Network Open found that “maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection during pregnancy was not associated with an increased risk of congenital anomalies in newborns.” CIDRAP has the news.
Initial studies had raised “concerns about maternal COVID infection and birth defects, specifically heart anomalies, while other research has shown no connection.”
Researchers in this study “analyzed 5,049 live births involving laboratory-confirmed maternal COVID infection and matched them to 20,196 live births without maternal infection from December 2020 through December 2021.” Congenital anomalies occurred in “3.2% of infants born to COVID-infected mothers, compared with 3.1% of those born to uninfected mothers.” That difference was not statistically significant.
The rate of abnormalities was also similar regardless of when infection occurred during pregnancy. COVID infection during the first trimester was “associated with 34.9 congenital anomalies per 1,000 live births, while no infection during the first trimester was associated with 31.8 anomalies per 1,000 live births. This, too, was a nonsignificant difference. There were also no statistically significant differences in incidence rates between groups in the second or third trimesters.”
Overall, all of the differences examined by the researchers in mothers with COVID infections during pregnancy and those without showed no statistically significant difference. The authors said that adjusting for demographic differences that could explain infection “did not alter the results” either, providing more reassurance to pregnant patients.
