Many pregnant women may undergo unnecessary cesarean sections because they have "white-coat hypertension"--high blood pressure that happens only when they are around doctors, a study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests. Almost one-third of pregnant women have such false high blood pressure.
Believing it is real hypertension, doctors usually treat it with blood pressure lowering drugs, which can compromise a woman's ability to have normal contractions and in the study led to apparently unnecessary cesareans, said research author Dr. Gianni Beliomo of Assisi Hospital in Italy.
Researchers studied 144 pregnant women who had high blood pressure during the final third of their pregnancies and found that 42 had white-coat hypertension. The women's blood pressure was normal when it was not being measured by a health professional, as shown by portable monitors the women wore for 24 hours.
Nineteen of these 42 women ultimately underwent cesareans (45 percent), a rate similar to the 42 cesareans (41 percent) among the 102 women with true hypertension. But only 13 cesarean deliveries (12 percent) were done among a comparison group of 103 women with normal blood pressure.
-AP wire service report, submitted by Rayner Garner
Reprinted from Midwifery Today E-News (Vol 1 Issue 44, Oct 29, 1999)
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