High Blood Pressure During Pregnancy. Part 1 of 3

High Blood Pressure During Pregnancy. When rich women have high blood pressure, more-intensive treatment doesn’t seem to affect their babies, but it may lower the odds that moms will blossom severely high blood pressure. That’s the conclusion of a clinical trial reported in the Jan 29, 2015 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Experts were divided, however, on how to elucidate the results. For one of the study’s authors, the choice is clear. Tighter blood pressure control, aiming to get women’s numbers “normalized,” is better, said the study’s create researcher, Dr Laura Magee, of the Child and Family Research Institute and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

And “If less-tight control had no benefit for the baby, then how do you justify the danger of severe (high blood pressure) in the mother?” said Magee. But current international guidelines on managing high blood pressure in pregnancy vary. And the advice from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) is predictable with the “less-tight” approach, according to Dr James Martin, a past president of ACOG. To him, the new findings support that guidance.

So “Tighter blood coercion control doesn’t seem to make much difference,” said Martin, who recently retired as director of maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. “This basically suggests we don’t have to substitution what we’re already doing”. High blood pressure, or hypertension, is the most common medical condition of pregnancy – affecting about 10 percent of pregnant women, according to Magee’s team.

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