Marguerite Duane, MD

Marguerite Duane, MD

Dr. Duane, a board-certified family physician, is co-founder and Executive Director of FACTS about Fertility, an organization dedicated to educating medical professionals and students about the science supporting fertility awareness-based methods (FABMs) and restorative reproductive medicine (RRM). She serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Georgetown and Associate Professor of Restorative Reproductive Medicine and Director of the Center for Fertility Awareness Based Education and Research at Duquesne University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine. Dr. Duane cares for patients via a direct primary care house-calls based practice, MD for Life. She has served on the board of the American Academy of Family Physicians and the Family Medicine Education Consortium. What We’ll Explore Miscarriage, also referred to as early pregnancy loss, is defined as spontaneous loss of pregnancy prior to 20 weeks gestation. With an estimated risk of 15% of clinically confirmed pregnancies ending in miscarriage, it is the most common adverse event in pregnancy, resulting in the loss of more than 500,000 human lives every year. If miscarriage was tracked as a cause of death, it would be the third leading cause of death in the United States second only to heart disease and cancer. Since miscarriage is so common and it is associated with significant physical and psychological morbidity, it is important to recognize its significance, assess who may be at increased risk for miscarriage and identify potentially modifiable risk factors that we may address to prevent this devastating tragedy whenever possible. This lecture includes a collection of patient cases with a history of miscarriage, who went on to have successful pregnancies after identification and treatment of relatively common modifiable risk factors.