What can cause high blood pressure in a female who was perfectly fine before she gave birth?
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at
3:28 PM
An associate of mine of normal weight and blood pressure, got pregnant and developed high blood pressure throughout her pregnancy. The moment she gave birth, the BP went back to normal. The doctor told her she should never get pregnant again. Against his advice, she got pregnant again and the high blood pressure not only came back but it stayed and has been with her since. Still a fairly normal weight, her BP can be normal one day and way the next. Any ideas on what could be causing this? It even has her doctors stumped.
Filed under: Potassium Questions
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A lot of times high bp is idiopathic, meaning doctors don’t know the cause of it. A lot of women get preeclampsia or high bp during p/g it’s quite common. As to why the high bp stayed with her after p/g there’s no telling. Even just a 10% weight gain can affect bp as well as salt, caffeine ect.. If your friend loses a bit of weight, cuts salt out of her diet and stops any and all caffeine she might see improvement. But otherwise she may just need to take a simple bp med from now on. I myself have high bp and have had it for 6 years and i’m only 28. My weight is a factor and my history as a bulimic affects it too, but even when i was skinny i still had high bp. I just accept it and work to keep it down with medication,diet,exercise, and no salt or caffine. People can live long healthy lives on bp med sif necessary. It’s not a huge life altering crisis..
I dont have a definitive answer but maybe this is a possibility. During pregnancy the work demand on the heart significantly increases due to the need to supply blood to the fetus. Its normal for a woman’s heart to increase in size during pregnancy. The heart is a muscle so it will grow in size as it takes on a higher work load like any other muscle. (we can see the hypertrophy of the heart in patients with chronic hypertension). So maybe your friends heart muscle increased in size during this second pregnancy enough to cause a greater contractile force in the left ventricle. The increased contractile force would send blood out into the body with greater force increasing blood pressure.