High Blood Pressure and Preeclampsia During Pregnancy – Future Risks

by Kevin Flatt
Filed under Blood Pressure, Pregnancy, Nutrition & Diet

Women, who in their first pregnancy, experience complications such as preeclampsia due to high blood pressure have a high risk of developing diabetes, cronic high blood pressure and blood clots for the rest of ther lives.

That’s according to researchers at Yale School of Medicine who worked in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Preeclampsia is a complication of pregnancy linked to life-threatening cardiovascular disease.

The researchers also found that women who have had two pregnancies complicated by preeclampsia are at an even higher risk of high blood pressure after pregnancy.

The study included over 11 million women who gave birth in Denmark from 1978 to 2007.

Of those women with preeclampsia the risks of subsequent high blood pressure were compounded with each preeclampsia complication during subsequent pregnancies.

“The only reliable treatment for preeclampsia is delivery of the baby,” said senior author Michael J. Paidas, M.D., associate professor and director of the Program for Thrombosis and Hemostasis in Women’s Health in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at Yale. “But while delivery may ‘cure’ preeclampsia in the moment, these mothers are at high risk of chronic hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus and blood clots for the rest of their lives.”

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