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Docs Don't Track Pregnancy Complications That Threaten Long-Term Health
- February 19, 2025
- Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter
Women who develop a complication like diabetes or high blood pressure during pregnancy are at higher risk of stroke or heart disease in the years after delivery.
Unfortunately, their doctors aren’t taking this health risk seriously enough, a new study suggests.
Fewer than 1 in 5 women (17%) diagnosed with gestational diabetes or high blood pressure received an adequate health screening in the year after pregnancy, researchers reported Feb. 17 in the journal Circulation.
Further, fewer than half (44%) of these at-risk women got such a screening within three years of their pregnancy.
"Women should be aware of their risk for cardiovascular disease, so that they can ask their doctors about risk factor screening,” lead researcher Dr. Amy Yu, a neurologist and senior scientist at the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Ontario, Canada, said in a news release.
“Having this knowledge can also support patients’ decision-making about lifestyle changes, which could improve their vascular health,” she added.
Guidelines recommend that women who develop high blood pressure or diabetes during pregnancy have their blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels checked out after delivery, to assess their long-term risk of heart disease.
"There's increasing evidence that maternal health during pregnancy is associated with long-term vascular health,” Yu said.
To see whether the recommended testing was being done, researchers analyzed the health records of more than a million pregnant women in Ontario between 2002 and 2019.
Results show that even after three years, most women hadn’t been fully screened for risk factors related to their pregnancy complication.
About 44% of those with a complication had been checked for either diabetes or high cholesterol within three years, compared with 33% of pregnant women who hadn’t suffered a complication, researchers found.
Family doctors were most likely to order these tests, the study found.
Given that, “strategies to improve screening practices should involve or be led by family doctors,” the research team concluded.
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on pregnancy-related deaths.
SOURCE: Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, news release, Feb. 17, 2025
