Cross-regional Variation of Complex Pregnancy Problems in Ethiopia

Adverse pregnancy outcome is a complex outcome of pregnancy other than the normal live birth. It lead to serious health consequences to the mother or the baby. It also can be still major public health and socioeconomic status problems in developing countries where most pregnancies are unplanned, complications. There is disparity of adverse pregnancy outcomes rate from region to region in Ethiopia. Objectives: The main objectives of the study were to identify the important determinant of adverse pregnancy outcomes in Ethiopia. With this study the multilevel logistic regression models were used to explore the major risk factors and regional variations. Different stages of multilevel models like intercept model and slope model were employed to attain the goal of the study. The results indicated that out of 15683 reproductive age of women, 8412 (86.8%) not experiencing adverse pregnancy outcome while 1282 (13.2%) of women have experienced adverse pregnancy outcome at the time of the survey. From multilevel logistic regression, it was found that the random intercept model provided the best fit for the data under consideration. All the fitted models gave the same conclusion that, Age of mother, place of residence, antenatal care visit and delivery place, Parity, Education of mother, Marital status, Anemia level were found to be statistically significant. Conclusion: The random intercept multilevel model provided the best fit for the data under consideration. Furthermore, it is found that not having Antenatal care, residing in rural area, working occupational status, being anemic, increased educational level, never married, divorced, or separated marital status, being in age group of 15-24 or >35 years are associated with increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcome among reproductive age group women in Ethiopia.