Hypertensive pregnancy disorders, especially preeclampsia, a form of high blood pressure during pregnancy, may lead to mental health problems in children, reveals a new study.
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‘Hypertensive pregnancy disorders, especially preeclampsia, a form of high blood pressure during pregnancy, may lead to mental health problems in children.’
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A Finnish study of 4,743 mother-child pairs found associations between hypertensive pregnancy disorders - including chronic hypertension (high blood pressure), gestational hypertension, preeclampsia and eclampsia - and childhood mental disorders. Preeclampsia is a common pregnancy complication often characterized by high blood pressure and protein in the urine, which indicates damage to other organs including the liver and kidneys. Eclampsia is a severe complication of preeclampsia in which high blood pressure during pregnancy results in seizures. Read More..
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Maternal preeclampsia and its severity were associated with an increase in the risk of any childhood mental disorder and psychological development and behavioral and emotional disorders in the offspring.
Researchers found:
- a 66% higher risk of mental disorders among children whose mothers had preeclampsia; and
- a two-fold higher risk of childhood mental issues among children whose mothers had severe preeclampsia.
The research team also noted that the combination of maternal hypertensive disorders, overweight/obesity and diabetes disorders in pregnancy increase the cumulative incidence of childhood mental disorders from 6.6% among offspring of mothers with none of those conditions to 22.2% in offspring exposed to all of these three adverse maternal conditions.
The associations of maternal preeclampsia with offspring childhood mental disorders are not explained by maternal mental disorders, age, substance use, number of previous pregnancies, education, overweight/obesity or diabetes disorders or paternal mental or hypertensive disorders.
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Hypertensive pregnancy disorders are key risk factors for maternal mortality, stillbirth, preterm birth and intrauterine growth restriction and they predict cardiovascular morbidity in the mother and her offspring.
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