Pregnancy tips Pregnancy and Heart Attack Risk

Most of us think of heart attacks being related to a blokage of a vessel, however, pregnant women may suffer from something called coronary dissection which is a tear in the vessel. If you think you may be prone to this condition, it may be something to get checked out before you conceive. Read more:

abcnews.go.com

From the article:

Heart attacks are usually triggered by atherosclerosis — a build-up of plaque that narrows the arteries and makes it harder for blood to flow. But only a third of heart attacks that occur during pregnancy are caused by atherosclerosis, Elkayam said. Rather the vast majority are caused by a tear of one of the three layers that make up a blood vessel known as a dissection.

Seventy percent of spontaneous coronary dissections occur in women and 30 percent of those occur during pregnancy or immediately after, according to Dr. Sharonne Hayes, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. who was not involved in the study. ”We have known for decades that young women with heart attack have higher mortality than men at the same age and also have very different cardiovascular disease risk factors,” she said.

Heart attacks are usually treated with clot-busting drugs and balloons or stents that open up the narrowed artery. But for pregnant women with dissections, typical treatments can make the situation significantly worse