Preeclampsia

Medical malpractice attorney Gary Zucker talks about cases involving preeclampsia. Preeclampsia is a potentially fatal condition that can occur during the last trimester of pregnancy.

MR. ZUCKER: Preeclampsia is a condition that occurs in certain women, usually in the last trimester of pregnancy. Doctors don’t know exactly why this happens. It’s probably just a genetic predisposition but some women develop this condition and the typical symptoms are elevated blood pressure, protein in the urine, and there may be some other signs or symptoms—abnormal weight gain, which should tip a doctor off to the fact that the woman may have preeclampsia. The mother can suffer seizures and at the time of delivery or just subsequent to delivery and can lead to the mother’s death during childbirth. So typically what the treatment is for preeclampsia is to admit the mother to the hospital, you start giving the mother steroids because that allows the child’s lungs to develop. You're probably going to have to deliver this child before the due date so you want to get those lungs built up as best as possible and that's done through administration of steroids to the mother. And then as soon as this child is viable the child needs to be delivered. These cases are tragic. You're talking about a child who is now going to grow up without a mother. There may be other siblings in the family who just lost their mother. We’ve had several cases such as this over the years. We have been very successful in obtaining substantial recoveries for those families, go on with their lives, and have some compensation for this devastating injury, the loss of the maternal head of the household.