Contemporary Burden of Cardiovascular Disease in Pregnancy: Insights From a Real-World Pregnancy Electronic Health Record Cohort
An erratum to this article was published (Circulation, 13 Jan 2026 ↗)
Authors' conclusion
In a large-scale electronic health record-based pregnancy cohort, both the prevalence of maternal cardiovascular comorbidities and CVD as well as the incidence of pregnancy-related cardiovascular complications within 1 year postpartum increased over the course of 2 decades.
Study context
- Population
- Pregnancies in a primary care EHR cohort, 2001–201938,996 individuals
- Participants
- 56,833 pregnancies
- Exposure
- Pregnancies with vs without CV complications
- Outcome
- Trends in prevalence of maternal CV comorbidities and CVD and incidence of pregnancy-related CV complications
- Follow-up
- 19 years
Methodological detailsmulti-institutional, electronic health record-based
- Multi-institutional
- Electronic health record-based
Main finding
As reported in the abstract
Prevalence of maternal CVD
4%
age-adjusted 8%
Age-adjusted CVD prevalence, 2001 vs 2019
1% vs 7%; P<0.001
Incidence of pregnancy-related CV complications
15%
age-adjusted 17%
Age-adjusted CV complication incidence, 2001 vs 2019
11% vs 13%; P<0.001
Observational data: associations, not effects.
Further findings
CV complications within 1 year postpartum, by maternal comorbidity (with vs without)
- Diabetes
- 6% versus 3%
- Hypertension
- 23% versus 5%
- CVD
- 10% versus 3%
- P<0.001 for all
Gestational age recovery by regular expressions
- Pregnancies with gestational age recovered
- 75%
- Correlation with manual review (Pearson r)
- 0.9
Original publication
Summarised from the published abstract; every number is checked against it