Post-mortem examinations
Table 1 summarizes all types of requested maternal,
placental and fetal post-mortem examinations following IUFD, independent
of availability of a local hospital guideline, and compares their
frequency between secondary and tertiary care hospitals. Whilst 44.4%
of tertiary care hospitals would consider conducting a fetal MRI after
fetal death, 89.2% of secondary care hospitals would never perform such
(p =0.036). Likewise, significantly more tertiary referral
hospitals would request chromosomal and microarray analysis following
IUFD (44.4%) compared to secondary referral hospitals (19.4%;p =0.016). No other significant differences in routine post-mortem
examinations were observed between secondary and tertiary referral
hospitals. In summary, the three most common post-mortem examinationsalways conducted in Austrian maternity units following IUFD are
placental histology (20.9%), fetal autopsy (13.1%) and maternal
antibody screen (11.5%; Figure 1 ). Performance of fetal
autopsy strongly correlated with the concomitant conduction of a fetal
genetic test (p =0.015) and placental histology (p =0.031),
yet was independent of the local facility of a department of pathology
(p =0.341) and type of referral hospital (p =0.451).