In order to avoid complications as much as possible, the European Society of Cardiology recommends that pregnant women themselves and their attending physicians try not to allow pregnancy to endure.
Professor Jolien Roos-Hesselink of the Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam stated that pregnancy over 40 weeks is not beneficial for the baby and may even have a negative effect, and for a woman with heart disease this is a dangerous period, which increases the load on the weakened organ, so it is necessary to stimulate childbirth upon reaching a period of 40 weeks or plan a cesarean section.
Cardiovascular disease is one of the main causes of death of pregnant women in Western countries. Compared to healthy women, cardiologist patients have a hundred times higher risk of death or heart failure.
Most of them still bear and give birth to children without any serious problems, but still complications among women with cardiovascular diseases are more common: premature birth, preeclampsia, postpartum hemorrhage. In 18-30% of cases, children of such women also have complications.
At the same time, the number of women becoming pregnant in the presence of cardiovascular disease is increasing.
This is due to the fact that, firstly, medicine helps more of these girls survive with congenital heart defects and reach childbearing age, and secondly, women increasingly postpone the birth of a child “for later”, and at an older age the likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease increases.
