COVID-19 Registry Tracks Pregnant Women, Newborns

What your doctor is reading on Medscape.com:

APRIL 09, 2020 — A multidisciplinary team of researchers has created a national registry to study how COVID-19 affects pregnant women and their newborns.

“Pregnant women are generally considered healthy, but they are also a vulnerable group, and we currently have no data on COVID-19 in pregnancy,” co–principal investigator Yalda Afshar, MD, PhD, an obstetrician/gynecologist at UCLA Health, Los Angeles, California, told Medscape Medical News.

“We expect this registry to provide data that will be critical in helping to improve care for pregnant women during this global pandemic,” Afshar, a fellow with UCLA Biodesign, stated in a news release.

The Pregnancy Coronavirus Outcomes Registry (PRIORITY) is enrolling pregnant women and those who have been pregnant or post partum within the past 6 weeks and who have either received a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 or are being evaluated for COVID-19.

Women are being recruited through their healthcare provider. A study coordinator contacts the participants by telephone. Women can also join the registry on their own without a referral by visiting the registry website.

The registry collects data on COVID-19 symptoms, clinical course, pregnancy, and neonatal outcomes and follows women from enrollment through the second and third trimesters and the postpartum period. The goal is to follow the mothers and babies for up to 1 year.

Hundreds of Women Already Enrolled

In speaking with Medscape Medical News, Afshar noted that these kinds of registries often take months to design and to receive funding, but with COVID-19, “there was no time for that. We had to get it up and running ASAP.”

She said the team has been “blown away” by how quickly people have come forward to join the registry. Within 2 weeks of going live, the registry had enrolled more than 400 participants from across the United States. “At this rate, I think we will easily get 1000 participants in a month or so,” Afshar said.

“With the global reach of this disease, the findings resulting from this work have the potential to impact millions of lives in an entire generation,” Johnese Spisso, CEO of UCLA Health, said in the news release.