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+--- Thread: Modern lifestyle puts pregnant women at greater risk of heart attack (/thread-modern-lifestyle-puts-pregnant-women-at-greater-risk-of-heart-attack)
Modern lifestyle puts pregnant women at greater risk of heart attack - cyrano - 10-09-2008 07:01 AM
By DANIEL MARTIN
Pregnant women may be three times more likely to have a heart attack than other women, a study has shown.
Doctors blame the increased risk on the recent trend for women to wait until later in life to have children, and the fact that many work full-time until late into pregnancy.
Although heart attacks during pregnancy and in labour are still low, the researchers who carried out the study say the risk is still unacceptably high.
They said doctors tended to ignore the risk of heart attack in pregnancy.
Professor Arie Roth from the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University said the risk could be cut by reducing blood pressure, stopping smoking and maintaining a healthy weight.
Despite warnings around 20 per cent of women in the UK still smoke through pregnancy.
The research, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, looked at data collected from 103 pregnant heart attack patients.
It said the risk of a pregnant woman having a heart attack was up to three times higher than a woman of the same age who was not pregnant.
The study is the first broad-based research to assess the phenomenon, providing guidance to doctors who are treating pregnant women.
'While most physicians assume that pregnant women are healthy to begin with, we wanted to emphasize to them that higher risk of heart attacks is very real,' said Professor Roth, a leading cardiologist.
'Women can experience multiple symptoms during pregnancy, and a predisposition to heart disease is often overlooked.
'Doctors have always wanted to know what causes heart attacks in pregnant women,' said Professor Roth.
The risk factors are the same as those for non-pregnant women: smoking while taking birth-control pills, drug abuse, high blood pressure, and being overweight.
The greatest risk is to expectant mothers who continued to smoke while taking birth-control pills before pregnancy.
This is 'the straw that breaks the camel's back'.
He said maintaining a modern lifestyle with a hectic work routine while pregnant can also exaggerate the risk.
'The pregnancy 'load' causes hormonal changes and ups the odds for blood clots to form and stop the heart,' he said.
Although the chances of having a heart attack while pregnant are still slim - about 6 in every 100,000 - Professor Roth said that women can cut their risk factor even more by giving birth at a hospital, not at home. "