Umbilical Cord Accident Research - Celebrate Sonum

Dear Friends and Family,

We lost our daughter, Sonum Leela Dittakavi, on September 20, 2018 at 39 weeks and 6 days due to an umbilical cord accident. 

We have identified the leading non-profit organization that is pursuing umbilical cord accident research: The Star Legacy Foundation. We invite you to donate towards their umbilical cord accident research projects on behalf of Sonum.

Thank you for your love and support.

-Shaylee and Naveen

The following is from Star Legacy Foundation:

The primary research project your donation will support: "A Systematic Scoping Review and Meta-Analysis of Umbilical Cord Characteristics and their Association with Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes"

Affecting 1 in every 160 deliveries, stillbirth is one of the most common adverse pregnancy outcomes in the United States (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 2009). Yet, it remains one of the most understudied and underfunded public health issues. The attention afforded to stillbirth is disproportionate given that worldwide, for example, there are twice as many stillbirths as deaths due to HIV/AIDS (Scott, 2011). As noted in the April 2011 issue of The Lancet stillbirth series, stillbirth has not received attention relative to the scope of the problem. Stillbirth has been called “one of the last taboos” (Scott, 2011) and “one of the most shamefully neglected areas of public health” (Darmstadt, 2011).

Stillbirth affects between 1.7 and 8.8 per 1,000 births after 28 weeks’ gestation in high- income countries. The significant disparity in stillbirth rates between and within countries suggest that further reductions are possible.

One way to generate a more complete understanding of a topic is to perform a systematic review and meta-analysis.

It will summarize what is currently known about the umbilical cord in normal pregnancy, the frequency of abnormalities and how these relate to stillbirth and other adverse pregnancy outcomes. This will be useful to researchers, clinicians and parents as it will give the most precise estimates available and understand how much these vary and whether there are reasons for variation between studies. Our similar review of placental pathology in stillbirth has been highly cited (46 citations in 3.5 years) and underpinned an international consensus statement on placental pathology in stillbirth. We anticipate that this systematic review will be of comparable importance and will underpin future clinical research into umbilical cord disorders.

This study will be coordinated by the Maternal and Fetal Research Centre at the University of Manchester.

Individual components of the systematic review will be undertaken by an international group of co-investigators with relevant expertise in clinical and pathological fields. These co-investigators will not receive any remuneration for their part in this research. Four members of this group were involved in the initial STARS cohort and case-control studies, which in collaboration with Star Legacy Foundation recruited 1,714 participants and led to the publication of three research papers with a further manuscript under peer-review. This demonstrates that this group of investigators has a track record of working with each other and Star Legacy Foundation.