Non-performance of urinalysis among pregnant women in Brazil

The purpose of this paper is to measure the prevalence, evaluate the trend and identify the factors associated with the non-performance of qualitative urine test (QUT) among pregnant women living in the extreme south of Brazil between 2007 and 2016.

All births occurred in the local maternity wards from January 1 to December 31 of 2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016. Mothers were interviewed within 48h after delivery. The outcome was the non-performance of QUT during pregnancy. χ² test was used to compare proportions and Poisson regression with robust variance adjustment for the multivariate analysis. The effect measure used was the prevalence ratio.

Of the 10,331 new mothers identified, 10,004 (96.8 percent) performed at least one prenatal visit. The prevalence of non-performance of QUT was 3.3 percent (95% CI 2.9–3.7 percent), ranging from 1.5 percent in 2007 to 5.3 percent in 2016 (p<0.001). The analysis showed that not living with a companion, having under four years of schooling, living with seven or more people in the household, having five or more children, having had one to three prenatal visits and not having been supplemented with ferrous sulfate during pregnancy showed a significantly higher prevalence rate to the non-performance of QUT.

The rate of non-performance of this test among pregnant women has clearly increased. Mothers at higher risk of unfavorable outcomes in pregnancy were the ones with the highest probability of not performing QUT. Increasing the number of prenatal visits is a high-impact measure toward the performance of this test.