Association of maternal blood pressure in pregnancy with blood pressure of their offspring through adolescence

Tamika Royal-Thomas; Daniel McGee; Debajyoti Sinha; Clive Osmond; Terrence Forrester

doi:10.1515/jpm-2014-0038

Article

Association of maternal blood pressure in pregnancy with blood pressure of their offspring through adolescence

Tamika Royal-Thomas , Daniel McGee , Debajyoti Sinha , Clive Osmond and Terrence Forrester

Published/Copyright: August 28, 2014

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From the journal Journal of Perinatal Medicine Volume 43 Issue 6

Abstract

This article looks at the association of maternal blood pressure with the blood pressure of the offspring from birth to childhood. The Barker hypothesis states that maternal and “in utero” attributes during pregnancy affect a child’s cardiovascular health throughout life. We present an analysis of a unique dataset that consists of three distinct developmental processes: maternal cardiovascular health during pregnancy; fetal development; and child’s cardiovascular health from birth to 14 years. This study explored whether a mother’s blood pressure reading in pregnancy predicts fetal development and determines if this in turn is related to the future cardiovascular health of the child. This article uses data that have been collected prospectively from a Jamaican cohort which involves the following three developmental processes: (1) maternal cardiovascular health during pregnancy which is the blood pressure and anthropometric measurements at seven time-points on the mother during pregnancy; (2) fetal development which consists of ultrasound measurements of the fetus taken at six time-points during pregnancy; and (3) child’s cardiovascular health which consists of the child’s blood pressure measurements at 24 time-points from birth to 14 years. The inter-relationship of these three processes was examined using linear mixed effects models. Our analyses indicated that attributes later in childhood development, such as child’s weight, child’s baseline systolic blood pressure (SBP), age and sex, predict the future cardiovascular health of children. The results also indicated that maternal attributes in pregnancy, such as mother’s baseline SBP and SBP change, predicted significantly child’s SBP over time.

Keywords: Adolescence; blood pressure; cardiovascular disease (CVD); coronary heart disease (CHD); fetal development; in utero; infant; maternal health; pregnancy; systolic

Corresponding author: Dr. Tamika Royal-Thomas, Tropical Medicine Research Institute, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Kingston 7, Jamaica, Phone: +876-927-1884, E-mail: tamika.royalthomas@gmail.com

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The authors stated that there are no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this article.

Received: 2014-2-4

Accepted: 2014-7-22

Published Online: 2014-8-28

Published in Print: 2015-11-1

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jpm-2014-0038

Keywords for this article

Adolescence; blood pressure; cardiovascular disease (CVD); coronary heart disease (CHD); fetal development; in utero; infant; maternal health; pregnancy; systolic