High Blood Pressure When Pregnant
Pregnancy and Hypertension
When a woman is pregnant, there are a number of new medical issues that she might run into during the course of her pregnancy as her body is changing radically. The changes that a woman is going through can have a significant impact on her health.
One of the changes that is closely monitored by doctors is something called gestational hypertension.
Also referred to as pregnancy-induced hypertension, it is when a woman who is more than 20 weeks into her pregnancy is diagnosed with having high blood pressure, but no protein in her urine.
If you have high blood pressure (also called hypertension) in the middle of your pregnancy and you have protein in your urine, you will have something called preeclampsia.
You might also suffer from high blood pressure before your pregnancy, and if you have been diagnosed with it before 20 weeks of pregnancy, you will have something called chronic hypertension.
Of course, before you attempt to diagnose yourself, you must check with your doctor to run tests and be accurately diagnosed. If you have gestational hypertension, the trick is to keep your blood pressure as low as possible, which goes without saying.
Most women have a very mild form of the condition and will move into hypertension near the end of the pregnancy. However, if you do have hypertension, you are at a slightly higher risk of being induced or having a C-section during birthing.
If you have been diagnosed with gestational hypertension before you’re at 37 weeks, you might be hospitalized for monitoring for a few days, but you will most likely be sent home to take it easy.
With gestational hypertension, you are at risk for certain complications, but often physicians just want to carefully monitor you more than anything else.
Some women do go from gestational hypertension to preeclampsia during the actual pregnancy or in the labor itself. Some women even have it shortly after they have given birth, so this is something that
your physician should warn you about.
It is also something every physician is aware of, just cover all the bases by being aware of it.
