Miscarriage Is The Most Common Complication Of Pregnancy

Introduction Miscarriage is the most common complication of pregnancy in the United States, occurring in 15-20% of clinically-recognized pregnancies, or ~1,000,000 cases annually. - Despite its frequency, the majority of Americans believe that it is a rare complication occurring in 5% or fewer of all pregnancies. Miscarriage can be an unexpected and emotionally devastating diagnosis for patients and their partners with studies showing that some women may suffer from psychological morbidity for months after the miscarriage and even into subsequent pregnancies. Our recent study revealed that those who have suffered a miscarriage frequently feel guilty, isolated and alone. Additionally, there are widespread misperceptions as to the†¦show more content†¦In this follow up study, we sought to assess the influence of celebrity and public figures revelations of their own loss on the publics’ perception of miscarriages. Materials and Methods A 19-item survey was constructed to assess the effect of public figures revelation of their loss on public perceptions of miscarriage. Miscarriage was defined as a pregnancy loss occurring earlier than 20 weeks. Four additional items (for a total of 27) were directed to those reporting a personal history of miscarriage and four additional items were specifically for those reporting recent awareness of celebrity loss. Both men and women were included in the survey. The survey was posted online using crowdsourcing web service Amazon.com Inc’s MTurk. The full survey can be seen in Appendix 1. Responders are anonymous, however they are given a unique identifier by Amazon which allows us to identify if any user has taken the survey more than once. We used MTurk users with an approval rating of 85% or greater (meaning 85% of their previous work on the site had been considered good). These parameters were chosen to help improve data quality. Additional discussion of the use of mechanical turk and parameters used can be found in our previous work. We had a 100 percent completion rate. We are unable to determine a view or participation rate as we are not able to determine the