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This transcript has been edited for clarity.
This is Dr JoAnn Manson, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. I’d like to talk with you about a recent report from the large-scale Black Women’s Health Study, published in the new journal NEJM Evidence.
This study looked at the association between hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, including preeclampsia and gestational hypertension, and the risk for stroke over the next 20 (median, 22) years. Previous studies have linked hypertensive disorders of pregnancy with an increased risk for stroke. However, most of these studies have been done in White women of European ancestry, and evidence in Black women has been very limited, despite a disproportionately high risk of having a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy and also of stroke.
This study, in more than 40,000 US women, found an increased risk for subsequent stroke among women with a prior history of hypertensive disorder of pregnancy — overall, a 66% increased risk, an 80% increased risk with gestational hypertension, and about a 50% increased risk with preeclampsia.
We know that pregnancy itself can lead to some remodeling of the vascular system, but we don’t know whether a direct causal relationship exists between preeclampsia or gestational hypertension and subsequent stroke. Another potential explanation is that these complications of pregnancy serve as a window into a woman’s future cardiometabolic health and a marker of her cardiovascular risk.
Regardless, the clinical implications are the same. First, we would want to prevent these complications of pregnancy whenever possible. Some women will be candidates for the use of aspirin if they are at high risk for preeclampsia, and certainly for monitoring blood pressure very closely during pregnancy. It will also be important to maintain blood pressure control in the postpartum period and during the subsequent years of adulthood to minimize risk for stroke, because hypertension is such a powerful risk factor for stroke.
It will also be tremendously important to intensify lifestyle modifications such as increasing physical activity and having a heart-healthy diet. These complications of pregnancy have also been linked in other studies to an increased risk for subsequent coronary heart disease events and heart failure.
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