Visualizing Maternal Mortality

Mike W
August 24, 2020

Background

  • Maternal mortality is a public health issue in developing countries and even some industrialized nations.
  • I used R Markdown and Shiny to graph maternal mortality trends over time, and illustrate global disparities.
  • Specifically, I plotted each country’s Maternal Mortality Ratio, defined as “the number of women who die from pregnancy-related causes while pregnant or within 42 days of pregnancy termination per 100,000 live births.”
  • Data were downloaded from Our World in Data, which has visualized numerous metrics of maternal health.

Global Trends

  • Here, we display the mean and median Maternal Mortality Ratio among all countries. We can see a clear reduction in maternal mortality over time. 
summarystats <- matmort %>% group_by(Year) %>% filter(Code != "") %>% summarize(Mean = mean(X), Median = median(X), Mode = getmode(X))
as.data.frame(summarystats)

   Year     Mean Median Mode
1  1990 5812.508    180    3
2  1991 5697.186    170    2
3  1992 5604.066    160    2
4  1993 5513.601    160    7
5  1994 5405.694    170    3
6  1995 5310.077    160  110
7  1996 5220.798    160    3
8  1997 5125.492    160    3
9  1998 5042.984    140    5
10 1999 4936.536    130    3
11 2000 4826.803    120    3
12 2001 4729.852    120    3
13 2002 4597.661    110    4
14 2003 4459.437    100    4
15 2004 4334.011     99    4
16 2005 4181.224     99    4
17 2006 4056.727     98    4
18 2007 3969.776     98    4
19 2008 3829.536     97    3
20 2009 3795.454     87    3
21 2010 3707.590     84    3
22 2011 3596.311     83    3
23 2012 3527.694     83    3
24 2013 3446.388     77    3
25 2014 3382.858     75    3
26 2015 3307.268     74    3

Our Shiny app

  • Here is a screenshot of our Shiny app Screenshot of Shiny app

Summary

  • Our Shiny application allows us to easily visualize maternal mortality data among many countries and regions, and view trends over time. (https://mc729345.shinyapps.io/maternalmortality/)
  • We have also demonstrated the ease and flexibility of using RPres. It is capable of building and publishing an attractive slidedeck with embedded R code and also images.

References