Women with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP), and preterm birth (PTB) have excess cardiovascular disease compared to those with uncomplicated births, perhaps related to pre-pregnancy inflammation, dysmetabolism or endothelial dysfunction. We included 1238 women in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study (1985-2011) with 2215 births classified according to outcomes (term, uncomplicated births were the referent). Repeated measures ANOVA estimated pre-pregnancy, post-pregnancy and biomarker change according to pregnancy outcomes, adjusted for confounders. GDM and HDP groups had higher pre-pregnancy hsCRP (+0.37 [0.08, 0.65]; +0.29 [0.04, 0.55] log mg/L), leptin (+0.29 [0.09, 0.50]; +0.37 [0.17, 0.56] log ng/ml), and lower adiponectin (-0.25 [-0.36, -0.13); -0.11 [-0.22, -0.01] log ng/ml) than those with uncomplicated births and these profiles persisted in magnitude post-pregnancy. Controlling for BMI attenuated most profiles, except lower pre-pregnancy adiponectin remained associated with GDM. PTB without HDP or GDM was related to lower pre-pregnancy hsCRP and sICAM-1 (-0.31 [-0.56, -0.06] log mg/L; -0.05 [-0.09, - 0.01] log ng/ml) and a larger leptin increase from pre- to post-pregnancy, (+0.20 [0.02, 0.37] log ng/ml). Pre-pregnancy inflammation and metabolic dysfunction contributed to GDM and HDP, perhaps due to higher BMI. PTB may be related to adverse metabolic changes post-pregnancy, though the unexpected endothelial biomarker profile warrants further study.
Keywords: Pregnancy; gestational diabetes; hypertension; inflammation; metabolism and endothelial dysfunction.
© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.