Miscarriage: types, diagnosis, treatment, prevention and aftercare

Published on March 31, 2024   44 min

A selection of talks on Gynaecology & Obstetrics

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0:00
Hello, this is Sarah Prager, and I am going to speak to you about miscarriage. We'll talk about types, diagnosis, treatment prevention and aftercare. I am a professor of obstetrics and gynecology and complex family planning at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, Washington in the United States.
0:23
My objectives for this talk are to review the different types of miscarriage, also, to help all of us understand the diagnosis of early pregnancy loss, and to talk about different treatment options. We'll also discuss prevention, and hopefully by the end, we'll all understand some aftercare best practices.
0:44
When I talk about pregnancy loss, I like to start with nomenclature. As you have already heard, I've used a couple of different terms. I've used the term miscarriage, I've used the term pregnancy loss, you may also hear the term pregnancy failure or early pregnancy failure, and sometimes also the term spontaneous abortion. All of these basically mean the same thing. What I like to just make clear is that for some people, or some providers, or some clinical settings, the term abortion can be very charged. I like to explain that spontaneous abortion is a medical term that we use that means the same thing as miscarriage. The miscarriage is probably the term that people understand best, lay people who are not in the medical field. In terms of using early pregnancy loss versus early pregnancy failure, I prefer early pregnancy loss because I feel like that more honors the experience of the person going through this and helps them to not feel like they are a failure and to really identify that this is experienced as a pregnancy loss. I also like to talk about the nomenclature of the instruments that we use. Many of you might already be aware of a manual vacuum aspirator, or MVA. We use that to aspirate the uterus, which can be referred to as a manual uterine aspiration. This is also synonymous with what we call a suction D&C, or sometimes just called a D&C. I like to differentiate, however, that we're not typically using a sharp curette. So the phrase D&C is often not accurate anymore. The recommendation is to use MVA to do a uterine aspiration, not to use a sharp curette as the primary method of performing this procedure. Early pregnancy loss is a nonviable,

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Miscarriage: types, diagnosis, treatment, prevention and aftercare

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