specific info on cesarean rates?

[jeminijad]

I know that the national rate, and often rates by state/hospital are out there. What I wonder is what the rate of primary cesarean in my particular demographic is- women who have had 1 or more uncomplicated vaginal births (I've had 2,) under age 35 (or whatever the cutoff is for 'elderly.'

Has anyone seen the data framed this way?

[kltroy]

I haven't seen anything like this published, but you can diddle with the online VBAC success calculator to get a sense of it. You would put in your current demographic info and then I would go ahead and check the boxes for "previous VBAC" and "previous vaginal birth" and click no for "arrest of descent". That will give you a low-ball estimate of success.

When I plug in my current info like that, I get a 95.8% success rate.

Anyway, vbac calculator is here:
http://www.bsc.gwu.edu/mfmu/vagbirth.html

[wombatclay]

So you're looking for the rate of primary cesareans in women with prior vaginsl deliveries in your age range? Hmmmm.... intersting. I've seen the stats for primary c/s flipped around a bunch of ways but I'm not sure I've seen that one. But I'll start looking!


ETA- found this one...

Search down for "multipara" in this slide show... it has statistics for primary cesarean in multiparas.

And NJ again here

Standard deliveries to multiparas without a prior cesarean (class 2) is the largest share of all live births, but their lower risk of primary cesarean delivery gives them a much smaller share of all procedures conducted. This category, however, experienced the greatest proportional increase—8.6 percent annually

and

Primary cesareans to multiparas without prior cesarean (standard delivery, class 2) accounted for 10.3 percent of all cesareans

[wombatclay]

Check out Tables 2-4 (especially Table 4)... groups 3, 4a, and 4b all represent multiparas with no previous c/s history and they're divided out by age and some birth details (induced vs spontaneous for example).

Contribution of Select Maternal Groups to Temporal Trends in Rates of Caesarean Section
Victoria M. Allen, MD, MSc, FRCSC,1 Thomas F. Baskett, MB, FRCSC,1 Colleen M. O’Connell, PhD2

Nova Scotia Atlee Perinatal Database, all deliveries by CS during the 24-year period from 1984 to 2007, at the Women’s Hospital, IWK Health Centre were identified. Deliveries by CS were classified into groups using parity (nullipara/multipara), plurality (singleton/multiple), presentation (cephalic/breech/transverse), gestational age (term/preterm), history of previous CS (previous CS/no previous CS), and labour
(spontaneous/induced/no labour).

[jeminijad]

Thank you, Wombatclay.

[jeminijad]

So if (rounding off & generalizing,) there is a 30% surgical birth rate across the whole population, and 10% of those are to multiparas w/previous vaginal births... that is something like 3%, unless my understand of statistics is really poor.

Encouraging, but hard to believe.

[MegBoz]

Originally Posted by jeminijad

So if (rounding off & generalizing,) there is a 30% surgical birth rate across the whole population, and 10% of those are to multiparas w/previous vaginal births... that is something like 3%, unless my understand of statistics is really poor.

Encouraging, but hard to believe.

Are you saying only 3% of women in your demographic (multiparas w/previous vaginal births) have CS? No, that wouldn't be the right way to crunch the data.
This is a very old stat, but the 1st I found: http://www.childbirth.org/section/CSFact.html
"The latest statistics indicate that 967,000 cesareans were performed in the US in 1989."

So we know it's increased substantially since '89, so we can round off & say 1mill even. So that means of the 1mill CS that were performed, 100,000 of those were performed on women in that demographic. So then to calculate the odds, you'd need to know how many women in that demographic gave birth the same year to calculate what % of those women had CS.

[kltroy]

Originally Posted by MegBoz

Are you saying only 3% of women in your demographic (multiparas w/previous vaginal births) have CS?

This interpretation appears to be consistent with the numbers that the VBAC calculator spit out, anyway. (multip with at least one previous VBAC has a 4.2% c/section rate according to that). And as far as I can understand, appears to be about right. Figure the c/s is likely to happen only for previa or malpresentation, since if mom had a healthy pregnancy the first time, she's likely to do so again this time.