Conference Coverage
Aspirin blunts early stroke risk from preeclampsia
Aspirin use dampened the rise in early-onset strokes seen after preeclampsia.
These findings were independently confirmed recently in a population-based retrospective study of nearly 303,000 Florida women free of prepregnancy hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, or renal disease who were followed for a median of 4.9 years after their first delivery. During that relative brief follow-up period, the adjusted risk of cardiovascular disease was increased by 19% in those with a maternal placental syndrome, compared with those without. And the risk was additive: women with more than one maternal placental syndrome had a 43% greater short-term risk of developing cardiovascular disease, compared with those with none. And when women with a maternal placental syndrome also had a preterm birth or a small-for-gestational age baby, their risk increased 45% (Am J Obstet Gynecol. 2016;215[4]:484.e1-484.e14).
It’s not just preeclampsia, which affects 3%-5% of all pregnancies, and gestational hypertension – defined as high blood pressure arising only after 20 weeks’ gestation and without proteinuria – that have been linked to future premature cardiovascular disease. In the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966, in which investigators have followed 10,314 women born in that year for 39 years, any form of high blood pressure during pregnancy was a harbinger of subsequent cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease. That included chronic isolated systolic and isolated diastolic hypertension (Circulation. 2013;127[6]:681-90).
The pathophysiologic processes involved in complicated pregnancies echo those of CAD and stroke: inflammation, altered angiogenesis, vasculopathy, thrombosis, and insulin resistance. Still unsettled, however, is the chicken-versus-egg question of whether preeclampsia and other pregnancy complications represent the initial expression of an adverse phenotype associated with early development of cardiovascular disease or the complications injure the vascular endothelium and thereby trigger accelerated atherosclerosis. In any case, markers of endothelial activation have been documented up to 15 years after an episode of preeclampsia, Dr. Warnes said.
All of these data underscore the importance of identifying at-risk women based upon reproductive history, scheduling additional medical checkups so they don’t drop off the radar for the next 20 years, encouraging lifestyle modification, and giving consideration to early initiation of antihypertensive and lipid-lowering therapies.
“Pregnancy complications give us a glimpse of this awful disease trajectory at a time when women are completely asymptomatic and we could intervene and perhaps change outcomes with targeted therapy when it might be expected to work better and patients might be more receptive to such interventions,” she said.
Dr. Warnes reported having no financial conflicts of interest.