Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring for Diagnosis and Management of Hypertension in Pregnant Women

Abstract

Hypertension disorders during pregnancy has a wide range of severities, from a mild clinical condition to a life-threatening one. Currently, office BP is still the main method for the diagnosis of hypertension during pregnancy. Despite of the limitation these measurements, in clinical practice office BP of 140/90 mmHg cut point is used to simplify diagnosis and treatment decisions. The out-of-office BP evaluations are it comes to discarding white-coat hypertension with little utility in practice to rule out masked hypertension and nocturnal hypertension. In this revision, we analyzed the current evidence of the role of ABPM in diagnosing and managing pregnant women. ABPM has a defined role in the evaluation of BP levels in pregnant women, being appropriate performing an ABPM to classification of HDP before 20 weeks of gestation and second ABMP performed between 20-30 weeks of gestation to detected of women with a high risk of development of PE. Furthermore, we propose to, discarding white-coat hypertension and detecting masked chronic hypertension in pregnant women with office BP > 125/75 mmHg. Finally, in women who had PE, a third ABPM in the post-partum period could identify those with higher long-term cardiovascular risk related with masked hypertension.

Keywords: ambulatory blood pressure monitoring; hypertension disorder pregnancy; masked hypertension; nocturnal hypertension; preeclmpaisa.

Figure 1

Evolution of blood pressure in a normal pregnancy.

Figure 2

Hypertensive disorder pregnancy according to weeks of gestation.