New research on blood pressure and pregnancy
High blood pressure during pregnancy can lead to higher risk of stroke and heart failure, a Cork researcher has found.
Research published this week in the journal Circulation has found that women with high blood pressure in pregnancy, including conditions such as preeclampsia, have an increased risk of developing cardiovascular disorders later in life.
Dr Fergus McCarthy from the INFANT Research Centre at UCC, while working at King’s College London, led a team of researchers that studied electronic UK health records from 1997 to 2016 to recreate a UK population-based cohort of 1.3 million women covering nearly 1.9 million completed pregnancies.
They used statistical analysis to determine the associations between hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, such as preeclampsia with 12 cardiovascular disorders.
They found that during the 20 year study period, 18,624 cardiovascular events occurred such as heart attacks, stroke, heart failure, of which 65 per cent occurred in women under 40 years of age.
High blood pressure in pregnancy affects up to ten per cent of pregnancies often causing complications in the woman and requiring early delivery of their baby.
Women who had one or more pregnancies affected by preeclampsia or other types of pregnancy hypertension were more likely to have a stroke, heart attack, heart failure, or similar event.
Women with pregnancy high blood pressure had twice the number of deaths in this follow-up period from cardiovascular disease compared with women without pregnancy high blood pressure.
These women also developed chronic hypertension 4.5 times faster than women without pregnancy high blood pressure.
Lead author, Dr Fergus McCarthy, INFANT Research Centre, University College Cork, said: “This research further supports the evidence that what occurs in pregnancy has lifelong implications for a mother’s health.
“By looking at pregnancy outcomes, we may have an excellent opportunity to identify women at high risk of cardiovascular disease and offer them early interventions after pregnancy to try and reduce this risk. It is critical now that we focus our research on potential interventions to improve the long-term health of mothers.”
The next steps in this research are to determine what interventions, such as diet modifications, salt reduction, exercise or medications that may protect the heart, may work in the women after pregnancy to try and reduce this risk and improve long-term health.