Researchers Link
Miscarriages, Heart Disease

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women who experience multiple miscarriages may have an elevated risk of heart disease, a new study shows.

Compared to women who never miscarried, those who lost one or more pregnancies were 50% more likely to be hospitalized for heart disease or actually suffer a heart attack, according to the study published in Friday's issue of the British Medical Journal.

This and other studies have shown that complications during pregnancy may be a sign of future health problems in the mother, the study's lead author, Dr. Gordon C. S. Smith, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom said in an interview with Reuters Health.

"Pregnancy represents a major challenge of adaptation for the mother's heart and blood vessels," Smith added. "We feel that the complications of pregnancy may be the first manifestation of an underlying tendency toward cardiovascular disease which may ultimately manifest in symptomatic heart disease."

Smith and his colleagues don't yet know why miscarriages might signal future heart disease. But, he said, "It is known that women who have an increased tendency to clotting are at increased risk of miscarriage."

The British researchers studied data from 129,290 Scottish women who delivered their first babies between 1981 and 1985. Smith and his colleagues checked to see which women had had miscarriages prior to giving birth. Then they checked to see which women later went on to develop heart disease.

Ultimately, the researchers determined that the risk of heart disease increased by 50% if a woman had lost one or more pregnancies.

Women who lost more than three pregnancies were twice as likely to develop heart disease as women who had experienced no miscarriages, according to Smith. But because of the small number of women in the study who fit this description, the researchers could not be sure that this was not simply a chance association.

The new results give doctors one more bit of information to use when trying to calculate a woman's risk of developing heart disease, Smith said.

"We would hope that with further research it might be possible to incorporate a woman's reproductive history into her general assessment of cardiovascular disease," he added. "Further research is required to identify the mechanisms which lead to the observed associations in order to identify effective interventions."

SOURCE: British Medical Journal 2003;326:423-424.

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