Preeclampsia is associated with at least doubled risk of premature cardiovascular disease (CVD) including heart attacks, stroke, Type 2 diabetes. This increased risk is present within 5 years of an affected pregnancy and continues lifelong. However, due to the low absolute risk of cardiovascular disease in pre-menopausal women traditional CVD risk calculators perform poorly, evidence regarding effectiveness of both pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions to lower CVD risk in the early postpartum years is lacking, and postpartum care systems are poorly equipped to deal with these issues.
This talk will (a) Discuss the work of our group and our collaborators on cardiovascular risk prediction after preeclampsia, using epidemiological data, cohorts in the early years after preeclampsia (P4 study), and biomarkers (b) Present the results of our Blood Pressure Postpartum (BP2) RCT of structured follow-up and lifestyle behaviour change in the first 12 months after preeclampsia and other hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (c) Discuss implementation of post-preeclampsia health into care systems.