Pregnancy Increases Heart Attack Risk

Ike S. Okwuosa, MD reports:

CHICAGO - Heart attacks are ofttimes linked to high blood pressure, diabetes and smoking. But a recent study suggests pregnancy can also be augmented the risk.

"There are betokening hormonal changes that occur during pregnancy that pretend to the coronary arteries," said study original Dr. Uri Elkayam, professor of remedial agent, cardiology, and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Southern California.

Those pregnancy-of the same family hormonal changes, Elkayam said, leave women "impressible to clots."

Elkayam and colleagues reviewed 150 cases of courage attack during pregnancy between 2005 and 2011. They presented their findings today at the 61 st parley of the American College of Cardiology in Chicago.

Heart attacks are usually triggered ~ means of atherosclerosis - a build-up of enamelled plate that narrows the arteries and makes it harder as being blood to flow. But only a third of heart attacks that occur for the time of pregnancy are caused by atherosclerosis, Elkayam said. Rather the vast majority are caused ~ means of a tear of one of the three layers that form up a blood vessel known for the re~on that a dissection.

Seventy percent of unconstrained coronary dissections occur in women and 30 percent of those occur for the period of pregnancy or immediately after, according to Dr. Sharon Hayes, a cardiologist at the Mayo clinic in Rochester, Minn. who was not involved in the study. "We obtain known for decades that young women through heart attack have higher mortality than men at the identical age and also have very various cardiovascular disease risk factors," she afore~.

Heart attacks are usually treated with clot-busting drugs and balloons or stents that show up the narrowed artery. But in quest of pregnant women with dissections, typical treatments can make the situation significantly worse.

Elkayam place that "performing a coronary angiogram, in which you inflate a balloon and put a stent, in 5 percent of the patients made things worse… In patients who are abiding, we advise to evaluate the indefatigable non-invasively, and only the primeval risk patient should undergo a cardiac catherization," he said.

A passion attack occurring in a young, before healthy young woman is very uncommon, with a reported incidence of 1/16,000. Elkayam emphasized that "women should not subsist afraid to become pregnant because the incidence of a love attack is very small."

Dr. Okwuosa is ~y internal medicine resident Northwestern Memorial Hospital's Feinberg School of Medicine.