This New Study Found That United States-Born Black Women Are More Likely To Suffer From Preeclampsia, Which Can Be Fatal For Moms And Their Babies

A new study, conducted by a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine, sought to “examine differences in cardiovascular risk factors and preeclampsia prevalence by race and ethnicity, nativity and duration of U.S. residence among Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black, and non-Hispanic White women.”

The study found that United States-born Black women are actually at a greater risk of preeclampsia than Black women who immigrated to the U.S.

According to the Mayo Clinic, preeclampsia is “a pregnancy complication characterized by high blood pressure and signs of damage to another organ system– most often the liver and kidneys.”

This complication usually occurs after twenty weeks of pregnancy in women with otherwise regular blood pressure stats.

If untreated, the complication can be fatal for both mother and child. After all, hypertensive disorders like preeclampsia are “among the leading causes of maternal mortality in the U.S” and affect about one in twenty-five pregnancies nationwide.

The study encompassed a group of over six thousand racially diverse women and took place from October 1988 to February 2016. The average age of the participants was twenty-seven years old, and each participant self-identified their race and ethnicity.

After analyzing the results, researchers found that “US-born Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black, and non-Hispanic white women had worse cardiovascular risk profiles than their counterparts born outside the U.S.”

Additionally, women across all three groups who lived in the United States for at least ten years had worse cardiovascular risk profiles than women with less than ten years of U.S. residence.

Finally, the study concluded that non-Hispanic Black women were at the highest risk of preeclampsia.

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