Maternal age, another potentially influential factor, was grouped into 5 year age bands from under 20 to more than 40.īetween January 2014 and December 2019, 4,391,569 singleton babies at or above 24 weeks were born to mothers resident in the UK. Levels of deprivation were assessed by linking the mother’s residential postcode at the time of the birth to local measures showing the proportion of children living in families either in receipt of unemployment benefits or tax credits, and with a reported household income less than 60% of the national average. MBRRACE-UK collects information on all live and stillbirths, including ethnicity, for mothers resident in each of the 4 UK countries.Įthnicity is categorised as: white Indian Pakistani Bangladeshi other Asian black Caribbean black African and other black mixed ethnicities and other (to include Chinese). In a bid to plug this knowledge gap, the researchers analysed data from the Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries across the UK (MBRRACE-UK) programme from 2014 to 2019. But there’s not much research into ethnic inequalities in stillbirth rates, and little is known about differences in the causes of stillbirth between ethnic groups.

Stillbirth rates are higher in the UK than in many other comparable high-income countries, and are falling more slowly, despite government targets to cut rates by up to 50%.Įthnic minorities in the UK are typically more disadvantaged and likely to have poorer health outcomes than their white counterparts. Placental issues and birth defects are among the key causes in these groups, but the cause isn’t known in more than half of cases, the findings show. Key causes placental issues and birth defects, but unknown in more than half of casesĭespite an overall decline in stillbirths across the UK in recent years, rates among black and South Asian communities are still around double those of the rest of the population, finds an analysis of monitoring data, published in the open access journal BMJ Open. This is despite overall decline in rates in recent years

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