Peer Reviewed
Women's health

Recurrent miscarriage: investigating the potential causes

Michael Chapman, Gavin Sacks
Abstract
Ultimately, investigations will find a cause for recurrent miscarriage in fewer than 50% of affected women. Treatment of the underlying conditions provides hope for success in their next pregnancy. Even with multiple losses, the outlook for the next pregnancy should be optimistic even where no cause has been found.
Key Points

    Miscarriage is the loss of a pregnancy before the 20th gestational week. Recurrent miscarriage is traditionally defined as three such successive losses. Increasingly, couples are carefully planning their families using contraception until they have achieved their social, financial and career goals. Therefore, most pregnancies today are truly planned and very wanted. In this context, pregnancy loss becomes a very significant event, accompanied by feelings of grief and failure. All those involved in the care of couples experiencing a pregnancy loss should be sensitive to the significance of this loss, which is sometimes underestimated due to its common occurrence. Such empathy is even more essential in women experiencing recurrent miscarriage. Two or three miscarriages lead to earlier investigation of the potential causes.

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