The risk of being admitted to the hospital with heart disease is twice as high the year after birth for mothers of twins compared to singleton births, according to research published in the European Heart Journal [1] today (Monday). The risk is even higher in mothers of twins who had a high blood pressure condition during pregnancy.The research was led by Professor Cande Ananth from the Department of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Jersey, USA.
He said: “The rate of twin pregnancies worldwide has risen in recent decades, driven by fertility treatments and older maternal ages. Previous studies have shown no long-term increased risk of cardiovascular disease when following people with twin pregnancies for decades after delivery. However, this is counterintuitive to what we observe clinically when caring for patients with twin pregnancies.
“Given the unacceptably high rate of maternal mortality in the first year after birth due to cardiovascular disease, we wanted to examine whether twin pregnancies increase this risk.”
The researchers studied data on 36 million hospital deliveries taken from the US Nationwide Readmissions Database of US hospitals from 2010 to 2020. They divided pregnant patients into four groups: those who had twins but normal blood pressure during pregnancy, those who had twins and hypertensive disease of pregnancy (high blood pressure conditions), those who had singleton pregnancies with normal blood pressure, and those who had singleton pregnancies with hypertensive disease of pregnancy.