There has been a significant and alarming rise in the prevalence of maternal cardiovascular comorbidities and pregnancy-related cardiovascular complications over the past two decades.
BACKGROUND: Cardiac and vascular complications are the leading causes of maternal mortality and morbidity, but the contemporary burden of and secular trends in pregnancy-related cardiovascular complications are not well-characterized. We developed a multi-institutional electronic health record-based pregnancy cohort with rigorously defined cardiovascular outcomes to examine trends in prevalence of maternal cardiovascular comorbidities and cardiovascular disease (CVD) and incidence of pregnancy-related cardiovascular complications. METHODS: We identified pregnancy encounters that occurred between 2001 and 2019 from a primary care electronic health record cohort using International Classification of Diseases and Current Procedural Terminology codes. We used regular expressions to recover estimated gestational age from unstructured notes and used gestational age to define the pregnancy episode for each individual pregnancy. Leveraging this cohort, we quantified and examined trends in the prevalence of maternal cardiovascular comorbidities and CVD and incidence of cardiovascular complications in pregnancies over the course of 19 years of follow-up. We also compared clinical factors for pregnancies with and those without cardiovascular complications. RESULTS: <0.001 for all). CONCLUSIONS: In a large-scale electronic health record-based pregnancy cohort, both the prevalence of maternal cardiovascular comorbidities and CVD as well as the incidence of pregnancy-related cardiovascular complications within 1 year postpartum increased over the course of 2 decades. Our findings demonstrate an alarming rise in pregnancy-related cardiovascular complications in a contemporary real-world setting and highlight pregnancy as a crucial life opportunity for cardiovascular health optimization.
Lau et al. (Mon,) studied this question.