{"id":6251,"date":"2026-09-03T10:47:25","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T10:47:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/?p=6251"},"modified":"2026-09-03T10:47:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T10:47:27","slug":"the-risk-of-high-blood-pressure-in-pregnancy-is-rising-and-the-damage-can-be-life-changing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/?p=6251","title":{"rendered":"The risk of high blood pressure in pregnancy is rising\u2014and the damage can be life-changing"},"content":{"rendered":"

It <a href="https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/?p=6243" title="Whatever happened to … children infected with HIV due to failures in health<\/a>care?”>happened<\/a> so fast<\/p>\n

It was 2019, and Megan O\u2019Grady 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)\u2014dangerously high.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Grady was shocked: at a doctor visit just a few days before, her blood pressure was complete<\/a>ly normal. But now she was suffering from severe preeclampsia\u2014a 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<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt was so scary,\u201d she recalls. \u201cHe was born, and then they were having to check my blood pressure every hour after he was born. It was crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Grady is far from alone. The rate of high blood pressure in pregnancy<\/a> 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. What\u2019s more, cases of gestational hypertension\u2014high blood pressure that happens to someone for the first time while they are pregnant\u2014have been rising since 1989, the first year the condition was recorded on birth certificates.<\/p>\n

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Amanda Monta\u00f1ez; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The increase can\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s body mass indexes (BMIs) have been consistently going up.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> in U.S. mothers. And as with O\u2019Grady, the high blood pressure aspect of preeclampsia can come out of the blue.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we don\u2019t diagnose it soon enough or people stay pregnant too long, they can get really sick and, in the extreme, of course, die,\u201d Kilpatrick says. \u201cThat\u2019s the problem with the disease\u2014it can be very insidious.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cobese\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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Amanda Monta\u00f1ez; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A piece of data that could help doctors better understand and manage hypertension in pregnancy involves tracking how many weeks the pregnancy reached before birth, Sibai says. Once diagnosed, he says, gestational hypertension is supposed to be monitored very carefully in the interest of the woman, not just the fetus<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of our focus before was managing the pregnancy,\u201d he says. \u201cNow there is a big emphasis on how we are going to reduce morbidity in the woman.\u201d<\/p>\n

Preeclampsia is, at its heart, a systemic response to the placenta. An abnormal increase in a protein called sFlt-1 (soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase 1), which slows down placental growth, Kilpatrick says. This seems to be the trigger that leads to preeclampsia later<\/p>\n

In 2023 the U.S. approved the first blood test to diagnose preeclampsia, measuring the ratio of sFlt-1 to another placental protein that doesn\u2019t change. Kilpatrick was involved getting it approved<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve known it\u2019s been increasing partially because of better recognition and diagnosis,\u201d Kilpatrick says. Still, some women may not appreciate the risks of hypertension and preeclampsia. \u201cIt should be something women know about,\u201d she says<\/p>\n

When O\u2019Grady went to the hospital, she was diagnosed with a severe form of preeclampsia, a rare condition called HELLP syndrome (the acronym is based on symptoms: hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes and low platelet levels). The staff immediately gave her magnesium sulfate to prevent her from having seizures<\/p>\n

\u201cI had no concept of what that was,\u201d she says of HELLP syndrome, \u201cno concept that my chest pain was my liver being pushed up\u201d because of swelling and pressure<\/p>\n

High blood pressure in pregnancy carries lifelong consequences, raising the risk of cardiovascular disease and recurring hypertension. This is particularly true for preeclampsia<\/p>\n

O\u2019Grady recovered from her first pregnancy, and she and her husband planned carefully for their second. She went on beta-blockers in case her blood pressure started creeping up again\u2014it did<\/p>\n

At 24 weeks, her blood pressure started to climb, and eventually, she was admitted to a hospital for the remainder of her pregnancy. At 28 weeks, she delivered her baby. The nurses offered to play music in the delivery room. O\u2019Grady chose the Beatles classic \u201cLet It Be.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s out of your control,\u201d she says, describing that moment years later, with her two sons running around the house. Now she follows a healthy lifestyle that she hopes will ward off the risk of heart disease. \u201cYou just have to listen to your doctors and trust in their advice. You kind of have to hope that everything will be okay.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was 2019, and Megan O\u2019Grady 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6255,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[570,569,99,571,201],"class_list":["post-6251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pregnancy","tag-blood","tag-high","tag-pregnancy","tag-pressure","tag-risk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6251"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6254,"href":"https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6251\/revisions\/6254"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lumeamara.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}