Introduction
Maternal intrapartum fever is a common obstetric complication during labor, usually defined as temperature higher than or equal to 38 ℃1-3, but another few defined as over 37.4 ℃4, occurred in 1.6% to 34% parturients1. A variety of causes contribute to the etiology of intrapartum fever, including infective and non-infective reasons. Infectious factors, the least common explanation, mainly associate with clinical chorioamnionitis, urinary tract infection, and upper respiratory tract infection4-6. Additionally, most febrile patients during childbirth are secondary to non-infectious agents, involving in epidural analgesia, environmental temperature during labor, prolonged labor time, maternal underlying diseases4, 6-8. Fever during labor could trigger adverse obstetric effects, including postpartum hemorrhage, dystocia, cesarean delivery3, 9. In addition to the obstetric outcomes, adverse neonatal sequelae contain low Apgar scores, neonatal sepsis, hypotonia, neonatal encephalopathy, epileptic seizure, respiratory distress or asphyxia, and even infants death6, 9-11. Thus, intrapartum fever deserves more attention because of its high incidence and severe consequences.
Traditionally, general fever is often diagnosed by complete blood cell count (CBC)12, 13, this is because the value of CBC before and after fever alters. However, hardly publications describe the change of CBC in parturients suffered from intrapartum fever during the whole labor. Apart from this, some other new biomarkers, such as neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR)14, platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR)15, as well as monocyte-to-lymphocyte ratio (MLR)16, are increasingly emerged as effective markers linked to the measure of inflammation and expected to use for judging if a person has a fever. Similarly, this field also do not extend to the study of the intrapartum fever. Therefore, we focused on the pre-, intra-, and postpartum changing situation of patients with intrapartum fever during the birth process in this paper. In addition, the possibility of NLR, PLR, and MLR act as biomarkers was explored. Furthermore, the results of vaginal discharge culture in febrile mother were also observed.