Response: Does preconception care improve perinatal outcome?

I am writing in reference to the article ‘Does preconception care work?’ by Beckmann and coworkers. I support the authors’ aim of improving perinatal outcome and it seems intuitive that preconception care involving the reduction of maternal risk factors would achieve a healthier outcome for mother and baby. However, before funding preconception counselling, one needs to be sure that it works. The primary outcome of the study, the likelihood of being ‘healthy’, was assessed by a range of ‘interim’ measures not perinatal outcome. Interim measures included: preconception weight gain, cessation or reduction of smoking, folate supplementation, vaccination and consultation with a specialist. These indicators were measures of recommendations made to women in the treatment group during the 45-min consultation with a midwife and obstetrician. So, the study measured whether women exposed to preconception care did what they were instructed in their preconception consultation compared to women who did not receive preconception care. It is therefore not surprising that women who received preconception care had better interim ‘outcomes’ than women who did not receive preconception care. In addition to this, two of the interim measures were change in weight and change in BMI, and these are not independent of each other. Furthermore, although those women who did not receive preconception care were similar to those who did on a number of measures, they did have a poor pregnancy outcome, including a preterm birth rate of 30%. This is substantially higher than what is seen in Australia overall and higher than what would be expected in a tertiary referral centre. This suggests that the between-group difference is more a result of a poor outcome in the comparison group than a good outcome in the intervention group. An important risk factor for preterm birth is prior preterm birth and yet the prevalence of this risk factor in the two groups of women is not reported (although their history of miscarriage is similar). Beckmann et al. acknowledge that women who pursue preconception care are likely to be health conscious. At the conclusion of the article, the authors suggested that a less biased method of substantiating these findings would be a randomised controlled trial. Although they acknowledge that a randomised trial would have ethical challenges, a method of unbiased and ethical data collection such as a birth registry (which already exists in every state in Australia) could be used to collect data on preconception care. Such registries already include data on a range of risk factors, including smoking and BMI as well as some information on previous obstetric outcome. Georgia DEMPSTER, BBus, MCom, MPH (student) School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia E-mail: georgia.dempster@monash.edu