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Maternal recall of pregnancy complications may aid prediction of future CVD risk
Many women who have given birth are able to recall key pregnancy complications, including history of gestational diabetes, low infant birth weight and early gestational age at delivery, for an average of over 4 years postpartum, according to recent findings.
Gleaning this information using a validated survey instrument may help to predict future maternal CVD risk, the researchers wrote.
Researchers administered a maternal recall questionnaire to 971 women who had participated in a previous maternal cohort study. The questionnaire was based on a literature review of maternal recall data regarding gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, birth weight and gestational age at birth.
Participants were asked about each pregnancy complication in a number of ways to identify a subset of best-performance questions, determined through a joint review of all test statistics for each question in relation to the other questions. The researchers calculated prevalence, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV) and/or Spearman’s correlation coefficients (r) for each question.
Of the 971 women re-contacted for the survey, 526 (54%) responded. Compared with those who did not respond, survey respondents had a greater likelihood of being older, white, educated and not having given birth, and they were less likely to deliver infants with low birth weight during the study pregnancy.
Gestational diabetes was observed in 7.4% of women, 7.2% had preeclampsia, 12% had hypertension associated with pregnancy, 7.2% delivered an infant with a low birth weight and 14.8% delivered preterm.
The women had a mean recall length of 4.35 years postpartum. The most accurate recall was demonstrated for gestational diabetes (sensitivity: 91.9%; specificity: 98.1%; PPV: 79.1%; NPV; 99.3%) infant birth weight (r = 0.95), and length of gestation (r = 0.85). The participants showed only a moderate recall of preeclampsia (sensitivity: 79%; specificity: 96.9%; PPV: 68.2%; NPV; 98.2%) and pregnancy-related hypertension (sensitivity: 59.7%, specificity: 95.1%, PPV: 63.8%, NPV: 94.2%).
“If a woman says that she did not have a pregnancy complication, the consistently high specificity and NPVs observed in this study indicate that her self-report is very likely to be accurate.” the researcher wrote. “Similarly, women seem able to recall [gestational diabetes], gestation length, and birth weight accurately, whereas maternal recall of pregnancy-associated hypertension is less so. Surveys such as this one may prove useful indicators of a parous woman’s [CV] risk.” – by Jennifer Byrne
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.