Having Over Five Children May Increase Risks Of Heart Transplant Complications

April 29, 2009 by tanya
Filed under: Baby Health, News

Researchers in Paris claim that women who have five or more children may be at higher risk later on in life if they require a heart transplant.

The findings, made by the Internation Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation, were presented at their 29th Annual meeting.

Lead investigator, Cheri Silverstein, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee said “Pregnancy may represent an independent risk factor for yearly acute rejection risk,”

Women who have orthotopic heart transplantation were shown to be at higher risk of rejection compared to men.

Previous studies have suggested that when a women has over two pregnancies, they will be at higher risk for elevated panel reactive antibodies (PRA), which act as a marker for rejection.

Collecting data from the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) database for over a decade, they found data on rejection and number of children for 2644 women.

Women who had not had any children were found to have virtually no risk, compared to women with over five pregnancies who were the highest risk.

The study was only able to look at the data of patients who had survived over 275 days, and so could not investigate cases where there were hyperacute rejections or early adverse outcomes.

Moderator Stuart D. Russell told Medscape Transplantation “There’s no question that the incidence of presensitization and antibodies goes up with pregnancy,”

“What’s intriguing to me and to others is that there was another paper presented here [that showed that] mortality among patients with peripartum cardiomyopathy was significantly lower at 5 years, with the primary reason being noncompliance. With all the caveats of the UNOS dataset, it makes one wonder whether there might be a group of young women who get into a disastrous situation, and because of that, they may have issues with compliance, as well as the fact that they’re presensitized and, by that fact alone, are at increased risk.”