Having high blood pressure while you're pregnant may be linked to having a stroke within several years, a new study says. This link is stronger if your baby was premature, said the study published in the journal Stroke. "We know these women are at risk, but no one really knows if there (is) anything to do about it," said Dr. Baha Sibai, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in Ohio, and not affiliated with the study.
About one in 300 women aged 20 to 39 have strokes in the US each year, according to the American Heart Association. The researchers found that women aged 15 to 40 had about a one in 150 chance of having a stroke within six years, if they had high blood pressure during pregnancy. If a woman had both high blood pressure and a premature delivery, this jumped to about a one in 110 chance.
There was also a one in 225 chance of having a stroke if the baby was premature, even if the mother didn't have high blood pressure while she was pregnant. The researchers looked at two conditions that involve high blood pressure during pregnancy. One, gestational hypertension, is blood pressure greater than 140/90 after the 20th week of pregnancy, said study co-author Fung-Chang Sung, a professor of public health at the China Medical University in Taiwan.
Healthy blood pressure is 120/80 or lower, according to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI). About 20 percent of women go on to develop the second condition, preeclampsia. That life-threatening disorder involves high blood pressure during the second half of pregnancy and protein in the urine. It affects about five percent of pregnant women in the US, according to the NHLBI.
Doctors have known about the link between high blood pressure during pregnancy and stroke for about 30 years, said Sibai. These women should be followed more closely after they have their babies, to see if more attention to their health would reduce the risk of stroke later in life, he said.
What this study added was a look at the medical records of about 5800 Taiwanese women, about 1000 of whom had high blood pressure during pregnancy. Within six years of having a baby, 21 of the women with high blood pressure had a stroke. In women who did not have high blood pressure while they were pregnant, 40 had a stroke in the same time period.
Not very many women of that age have strokes, said Dr. David Williams, an obstetric consultant at the University College London Hospital in England, and it may have been better to study older women. "Sometime after menopause would be a good time to look at, because that's the time when risk increases," he said. To reduce the risk of stroke, Williams suggests the usual advice of keeping fit, eat sensibly and don't smoke. "Apart from indentifying women at an increased risk, we don't have any magic bullet" to stop this problem, he said.
Source: Reuters Health
No comments:
Post a Comment