Women with congenital heart disease can take heart in new recommendations for pregnancy

For generations, doctors told women who were born with complex congenital heart defects that the physical demands of pregnancy and delivery would be too difficult for them, and that they should not have babies.That mindset has shifted. Newrecommendations for health care providers, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, offer a road map to helping women with congenital heart disease have successful pregnancies.“There is a burgeoning group of women born with complex congenital heart disease who are now of childbearing age and want to get pregnant,” saidMary Canobbio, a nurse at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and lecturer at the UCLA School of Nursing who chaired the group that wrote the scientific statement. “The problem is, pregnancy in this population is very risky.”UCLA HealthMary Canobbio with a patientRecently, Canobbio has seen a growing number of women with congenital heart disease who wanted to have children.“We really didn’t have any data to refer to in order to help them make safe, informed decisions,” she said. “So I went on a mission to see if we could come up with some definitive answers for these women about the likelihood of becoming pregnant and steps we might need to take to help them d eliver their babies safely.”Canobbio collected data from hundreds of colleagues around the country, charting successful pregnancies and analyzing the approaches that were taken to care for these high-risk patients.The information sh...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news