TUESDAY, Sept. 14, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Women with hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP), with or without prepregnancy hypertension, have an increased risk for incident heart failure, according to a study published in the Sept. 7 issue of the Journal of the American Heart Association.
Angela M. Malek, Ph.D., from the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, and colleagues conducted a retrospective cohort study involving 425,649 women aged 12 to 49 years with a live, singleton birth to examine the associations of HDP and prepregnancy hypertension with maternal heart failure within one and five years of delivery.
Of the participants, 0.4 percent had prepregnancy hypertension without superimposed HDP, 15.7 percent had HDP alone, 2.2 percent had both prepregnancy hypertension and HDP, and 81.7 percent had neither condition. The researchers found that incident heart failure event rates were higher for non-Hispanic Black versus non-Hispanic White women with HDP (HDP: 2.28 versus 0.96 per 1,000 person-years; both conditions: 4.30 versus 1.22 per 1,000 person-years). Incident heart failure risk within five years of delivery was increased for women with prepregnancy hypertension, HDP, and both conditions compared with neither condition (hazard ratios, 2.55, 4.20, and 5.25, respectively) after adjustment.
“These racial and ethnic differences are important since we already know non-Hispanic Black women experience higher pregnancy-related deaths than non-Hispanic White women,” Malek said in a statement. “Clinical and public health prevention efforts are needed to reduce complications and death rates in women who have hypertensive disorders before or during pregnancy.”
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