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MONDAY, Feb. 5 (HealthDay News) -- High blood pressure during pregnancy is a warning sign of diabetes and heart disease later in life, a Dutch study indicates.
The study of 491 older, postmenopausal women found that those who had reported high blood pressure during a pregnancy had a 57 percent higher risk of developing calcium buildup in their arteries, compared with those whose blood pressure did not rise abnormally during pregnancy.
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The findings were published online in the Feb. 5 issue of the journal Hypertension.
Calcification of the arteries is a marker of atherosclerosis or "hardening of the arteries," which is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
"Our research and that of others may have important implications for the management of women who have high blood pressure in pregnancy," senior researcher Dr. Michiel L. Bots, associate professor of epidemiology at the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care in Utrecht, said in a statement.
The findings probably do not have implications for obstetric care, added Dr. Sharonne Hayes, director of the women's heart clinic at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
"We would still need to treat those women the same way as we now do during pregnancy," she said. "But now, those women have been marked as having an increased risk of heart disease. They have another marker of risk and need to be much more vigilant in looking for cardiovascular disease."
Previous studies have led to "a growing recognition that complications, and particularly cardiovascular complications, during pregnancy lead to an increased risk of heart disease later on," said Hayes, who is chair of the scientific advisory board of Women Heart: A National Coalition for Women With Heart Disease.
"As far as I know, this is the first to look at coronary calcification, which is a very good marker for the presence of cardiovascular disease," she said.
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