Written by Dr. Stacey Ellender

Literature documenting how patients experience and perceive miscarriage is relatively new, generally dating back only so far as the late 1970s. Research in this area is often limited in scope; many published studies have had less than 50 subjects, and the women interviewed tended to be that subset of women who had the resources and desire to receive both early prenatal care and post-miscarriage counseling services. Additionally, many studies on miscarriage conflate all subjects who lost a pregnancy at less than 24 weeks of gestation into one group. From the literature, it is difficult to delineate the specific effects of early miscarriage when the studies often do not distinguish between the experiences of persons with first trimester and second trimester loss. Furthermore, the large majority of pregnancies that were the subject matter of these studies were conceived without medical intervention, making it difficult for fertility specialists to readily determine which of these studies are relevant to their practice.

This article was published in the July 2009 issue of the IVF NEWS.Direct! journal.

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