Dr. Ravi Retnakaran. Archives

Women with pregnancy-related diabetes are at higher risk for developing cardiovascular disease in the decade after childbirth, a research review suggests.

While so-called gestational diabetes has long been linked to an increased risk of heart disease later in life, some previous research suggests this risk may depend on whether the condition evolves into type 2 diabetes that persists after delivery.

Researchers examined data from nine previous studies with almost 5.4 million mothers. Overall, about 8,000 women with a history of gestational diabetes experienced cardiovascular events like heart attacks and strokes, as did more than 93,000 women without this pregnancy complication.

“This study demonstrates that women with gestational diabetes have a 2-fold higher risk of major cardiovascular events than their peers,” said senior study author Dr. Ravi Retnakaran of the University of Toronto.

“This increased risk is not dependent upon (type 2 diabetes),” Retnakaran said by email. “The risk differential between women with gestational diabetes and their peers emerges within the first decade after pregnancy.”

Compared to women who didn’t have gestational diabetes, those who did had a 2.3-fold greater risk of events like heart attacks and strokes within the first decade after giving birth.

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The gender of a woman’s future child may be linked to her blood pressure six months before she becomes pregnant, a preliminary study suggests.

A team of Canadian and Chinese researchers found that a higher pre-pregnancy blood pressure reading may be associated with a greater likelihood for delivering a baby boy. Conversely, lower blood pressure may favor the odds of giving birth to a girl.

But the researchers only found an association between pre-pregnancy blood pressure and a baby’s gender. They did not prove a cause-and-effect connection.

How might a mom-to-be’s blood pressure predict her baby’s gender? That’s not completely clear. The researchers suspect blood pressure may be related to the gender of those babies carried to term, not lost to miscarriage.

“When a woman becomes pregnant, the sex of a fetus is determined by whether the father’s sperm provides an X or Y chromosome, and there is no evidence that this probability varies in humans,” said study lead author Dr. Ravi Retnakaran.

Dr. Ravi Retnakaran.

Study: Diabetes In Pregnancy Increases Heart Disease Risk

STUDY: Mom’s Blood Pressure During Pregnancy Could Predict Baby’s Gender