Time to recovery from eclampsia and its predictors among women in Bale Zone, Southeast Ethiopia: a hospital-based retrospective cohort study

Eclampsia is a significant public health scourge that has been attributed to causing 3.9 to 78.4% of maternal deaths in Ethiopia. Evidence on the time to recovery from eclampsia and its predictors in Africa is very limited. Thus, this study aimed to assess the time to recovery from eclampsia and its predictors among women in Southeast Ethiopia. A hospital-based retrospective follow-up study of randomly selected 701 pregnant and postpartum eclamptic women in Bale Zone hospitals, Southeast Ethiopia, from January 2018 to December 2022. Simple random sampling techniques were used to select individual mothers’ cards. Time to recovery from eclampsia (time-to-event): is the time from diagnosis of eclampsia to recovery. Kaplan-Meier and log-rank tests were used to estimate hazard functions. The Cox proportional hazard model was employed to identify determinants of the recovery time of eclampia. An adjusted hazard ratio (AHR) along with a 95% confidence interval was used to estimate the strength of the association between predictors and recovery time. A statistically significant association was declared at a p -value less than 0.05. The median recovery time was 72 h, with an inter-quartile range of 48–96 h. The Cox proportional hazard model revealed that being urban residents (AHR = 1.65, 95% CI: 1.36, 2.00), women with lower diastolic blood pressure (110 mmHg (median) (AHR = 1.43, 95% CI: 1.18, 1.73), singleton pregnancies (AHR = 1.72, 95% CI: 1.20, 2.48), and those diagnosed at the first trimester (AHR = 1.43, 95% CI: 1.10, 1.85) were significantly predictors of time to recovery of eclampsia. The median recovery time from severity features among eclamptic women in Southeast Ethiopia was 72 h (3 days). Eclampsia was associated with the patient’s residency, diastolic pressure level, type of pregnancy, and pregnancy trimester at the time of diagnosis. The findings have implications for clinicians and decision-makers to design effective management to alleviate eclampsia.