“What happens during pregnancy doesn’t just end when the baby’s born.”
Tania Saiz, a volunteer patient educator for the American Heart Association, noted this to The New York Times – a lesson she learned herself the hard way. At age 47, she had a stroke, but had no present health problems that would have predicted such an event.
Until she looked earlier on in her medical history, that is, and recalled the pre-eclampsia she suffered from while pregnant with her daughter some 20 years earlier. In addition to the ways in which the blood-pressure disorder complicates gestation itself, pre-eclampsia can also come with stroke risk for older women. Saiz had no idea.
Experts say there is, in fact, an increasing number of research efforts that connect pregnancy-related blood-pressure issues – which impact as many as 15% of all pregnancies – to later-developing maladies like strokes, coronary artery disease and heart failure. And those who experience gestational diabetes (roughly 10% of pregnancies) are 10 times more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes later on.
Yet many who get pregnant are in the dark about these longer-term risks, doctors note – in that regard, Saiz is far from alone. “This is not something that our mothers and grandmothers were aware of,” Dr. Lauren Hassen, director of the Cardiology Postpartum Transition Clinic at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, told the Times.
Some experts say that, despite more recently available research on the matter, doctors are reluctant to warn pregnant patients, out of concern for their in-the-moment wellbeing. Dr. Gina Lundberg, clinical director of the Emory Women’s Heart Center, said that if doctors “give you that information in the heat of it, you’re already overwhelmed and terrified for your baby, right? So they often shy away from that until a later appointment, which sometimes never happens.”
Compounding the problem is the lack of reliable obstetric and gynecological care available for women in general – in the U.S., a quarter of pregnant people aren’t even receiving prenatal care at all until their second trimesters. Proponents of the “tradwife” movement, meanwhile, actively discourage the sharing of health stories between women online via a growing, if informal, network of information, dismissing such disclosures as fear-mongering.
The combined result: Less than half of those who experienced pregnancy complications are subsequently screened for risk of stroke, heart failure or other potentially looming problems, because they simply don’t know to ask for it.
Experts suggest that patients be proactive in mentioning complications experienced during pregnancy to doctors as part of regular intake sessions and check-ups – and, to prioritize their own health in the first place. “Most women put themselves last,” Lundberg noted. “We kind of lose track of ourselves.”
