The risk of high blood pressure in pregnancy is rising—and the damage can be life-changing

A recent CDC analysis says that, between 2016 and 2024, the rate of high blood pressure among pregnant women rose by 73 percent

By Megha Satyanarayana edited by Claire Cameron

The rate of high blood pressure issues during pregnancy is going up in the U.S.

It was 2019, and Megan O’Grady was 32 weeks pregnant with her first child. She took her dogs for a walk, just as she usually did. But that day, she was surprised by how tired she was. Then her chest started to hurt. Later, sitting in a restaurant with her husband, she felt miserable. She realized something was wrong. By the time she got to the hospital that night, her blood pressure was 220/120 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg)—dangerously high.

O’Grady was shocked: at a doctor visit just a few days before, her blood pressure was completely normal. But now she was suffering from severe preeclampsia—a potentially deadly pregnancy complication marked by high blood pressure and organ damage. She rapidly found herself with no choice but to give birth, more than a month before she was due.

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“It was so scary,” she recalls. “He was born, and then they were having to check my blood pressure every hour after he was born. It was crazy.”

O’Grady is far from alone. The rate of high blood pressure in pregnancy has increased by 73 percent, between 2016 and 2024, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is a rate of about one in 10 women. What’s more, cases of gestational hypertension—high blood pressure that happens to someone for the first time while they are pregnant—have been rising since 1989, the first year the condition was recorded on birth certificates.

Amanda Montañez; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The increase can’t be easily explained by any single cause, says Sarah Kilpatrick, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. The average age of people’s first pregnancy is going up, and more people older than age 40 are having babies. More women are having twins and triplets more often because of in vitro fertilization. And women’s body mass indexes (BMIs) have been consistently going up.

Any one of these factors is a risk for high blood pressure, Kilpatrick says, and some people might have more than one. As pregnancies progress, gestational hypertension increases the risk of preeclampsia, which also leads to liver and kidney problems. The condition is diagnosed by blood pressure readings and signs of organ damage in urine or blood tests. It can be fatal: blood pressure problems during pregnancy are one of the leading causes of illness and death in U.S. mothers. And as with O’Grady, the high blood pressure aspect of preeclampsia can come out of the blue.

“If we don’t diagnose it soon enough or people stay pregnant too long, they can get really sick and, in the extreme, of course, die,” Kilpatrick says. “That’s the problem with the disease—it can be very insidious.”

The recent CDC report found that gestational hypertension in 2024 was highest among Native American and Black women. People age 40 and older and those whose BMI was considered “obese” were also most likely to have the condition. But in general, the rates of high blood pressure in pregnancy are rising, no matter what. Baha Sibai, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at in the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, believes the rate could be even higher because many birth certificates have incomplete data.

Amanda Montañez; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Source: Read the original article on www.scientificamerican.com