Pregnancy-Induced Hypertension

Hi,

I am Dr. Anu Sidana, Gynaecologist. Today I will talk about pregnancy included hypertension. It is affecting 1 pregnant woman out of 14 in India. It happens because of high blood pressure. It is also associated with swelling of face and feet. Presence of protein in the urine may or may not be there. What causes hyperglycemia or pregnancy-induced hypertension? It is a multi factorial disease. It is due to defective placentation. Placenta is connection between the mother and the baby. Now who are at risk of pregnancy-induced hypertension? It is most common during first pregnancy, age for than 40 and it also comes genetically. It happens in overweight patient, twin pregnancy and in diabetic patient. Its symptoms are rapid weight gain, high BP, swelling of feet and face. What are the complication of it? It may leads to vomiting, headache, blurring of eye, stomach pain. It may also leads to growth restriction in the baby, preterm labor pain. Its sudden rise in BP then it may lead to seizures and fit to the mother which is life-threatening.

We advice the patient to take appropriate bed rest. Stress, high salt intake to be avoided. If the patient is having any of the symptoms, she should approach to the Dr immediately. We give safer medicines to the patient for management of blood pressure. Our main is to control the blood pressure and have safe mother and baby till 37 weeks which is preterm period and after this, we should deliver the baby. Once the placenta will be out, severity of BP will also come down. We ask the patient to do daily fetal count. If the patient is not recovering well, in such cases we have to terminate the pregnancy. Otherwise, our main aim is to keep the patient on conservative management. If patient is going for labour then it is OK otherwise we induce the patient to deliver the baby as it is best for the patient. What are the main preventive measures? Maintain your weight prior to the pregnancy. Preconception is must to rule out the problems. If patient has high BP record then we can start with another medicines. Be safe and have a safe pregnancy.

Thank You