On Monday February 10, 2025 an article published by HealthDay News called Sister Study Shows Link Between Pregnancy Complication, Heart Risks, reported that new research shows that even just being a sister to a pregnant women can result in having an even higher heart risk, suggesting that it can be genetically shared within families. The study lead author Angla Mantel states that it is important to try and identify all of the women early on in order to offer preventive treatment for pregnancy complications as well as having life counseling to follow up on the potential cardiovascular disease risk. Pregnancy conditions such as premature delivery and preeclampsia spikes the blood pressure which can be commonly dangerous to the pregnancy, however numerous studies have shown that women who experience this during their pregnancy are now at a higher risk of heart disease later on in life. Mantels team wondered "what the role of genetics might be in this predisposition." So they decided to review medical records of more than 1.2 million Swedish women who were all free of heart disease during the time of the study. Most of the women have never had any complications during pregnancy, however nearly 166,000 women who did have history with heart disease, there was about 61,000 of their sisters who had never had any pregnancy complications. As expected women with history of pregnancy complications were at higher risk of long term heart issues compared to women without any history of it. But after reviewing the records of the sisters of complication affected women found a risk in the risk. Comparing the women with no complications to the sister group, they faced a 40% higher chance of heart issues over the follow up period. The finding of the study show that the risk of cardiovascular disease after a pregnancy complication does not just depend on how the pregnancy was alone but can also be influences by genes and the environmental factors.
I found this article very interesting because it this is not just a problem for women who are experiencing difficulties during their pregnancy but can also affect their sisters. This makes me wonder if having pregnancy complications could serve as an early warning sign for the families to seek preventative healthcare early on. This study suggests that genetics are shared with environmental factors in cardiovascular health which leads me to think that if women decided to seek preventative healthcare after finding having early complications, if doctors could use that information to identify high risk individuals earlier.
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hi arianna! i thought your blog post was really interesting. i had no idea that this was a thing. there are so many unknown things in the world of genetics and honestly it just keeps getting more interesting by the days as to what the scientists discover. this was a great blog post and i found it really informative as well as interesting!
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