Birth problems an Cerebrovascular disease link

Main Category: Pregnancy / Obstetrics
Article Date: 27 Feb 2004 - 0:00 PDT


If you have a low birth weight baby, or deliver preterm and/or experience spontaneous abortion you could be at an increased risk of developing cerebrovascular disease.

In a Scottish study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, women who delivered a low birth weight infant (<2500 g) were 2.5-times more likely to experience a cerebrovascular event than women who delivered a baby weighing at least 3500 g.

Previous reports have shown that low birth weight infants have an elevated risk of cerebrovascular disease later in life, but it was unclear if adverse pregnancy outcomes also predicted cerebrovascular problems for the mother.

The authors analysed data from all first singleton livebirths that took place in Scotland between 1981 and 1985.

Of the 119,688 mothers who delivered during this period, 342 went on to experience a cerebrovascular event over 14 to 19 years of follow-up.

Preterm delivery and previous spontaneous abortion raised the risk of maternal cerebrovascular events by 91% and 49%, respectively.

The presence of both of these factors coupled with delivery of a baby in the lowest birth weight quintile increased the risk sevenfold.

'We hypothesize that occult cerebrovascular disease or hemostatic dysfunction may be manifested in pregnancy by complications predisposing to low birth weight and spontaneous abortion, and that symptomatic cerebrovascular disease may be a later manifestation of the same underlying defect,' the authors conclude.

Reference: Am J Epidemiol 2004;159:336-342

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