New research has found that women who have had a miscarriage or stillbirth have an increased risk of stroke.
Researchers suggest that this happens when blood can’t get to the brain and the risk increases with each miscarriage or stillbirth.
The study, published by the British Medical Journal, is based on data from more than 600,000 women from Australia, China, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and the U.S. and is the first to show the link between pregnancy loss and stroke.
“Many women are unaware their experiences during pregnancy can be an early marker of later health dangers,” says Gita Mishra, professor of life course epidemiology at the University of Queensland and author of the study.
“Our findings strengthen findings from a previous systematic review that found similar results, but showed limited evidence linked to stroke subtypes and show that doctors should be alert to the patients’ increased risk.”
Among the women who had ever been pregnant, women who had experienced a miscarriage had an 11 per cent higher risk of a non-fatal stroke and 17 per cent higher risk of a fatal stroke compared with women who have not had a miscarriage.
The risk increased with each miscarriage, with women who suffered three or more miscarriages having a 35 per cent higher risk for non-fatal stroke and an 82 percent higher risk in fatal strokes.
Stillbirth also significantly increased the risk of stroke. Women who had a history of stillbirth had a 31 per cent higher risk of non-fatal strokes and a seven per cent higher risk of fatal strokes.
Miscarriage and stillbirth are signals a woman is at increased risk of cardiovascular disease, the study suggests. These events can occur many years before a woman develops other risk factors, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or high cholesterol.
