Prevalence of cardiovascular diseases among pregnant women who were attending antenatal care in jimma university medical center, southwest Ethiopia

Abstract

Pregnant women with underlying cardiovascular disease are at increased risk for adverse maternal and perinatal outcomes due to difficulty in tolerating the physiologic changes of pregnancy. Cardiac disease complicates 1–4% of pregnancies and, Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy affects 5 to 10% of pregnant women worldwide and, resulted in poor maternal and prenatal outcome. Rheumatic heart disease is the commonest cardiac disease among pregnant women with heart disease in developing countries. Despite all this, there is no adequate finding on the overall prevalence of cardiovascular diseases among pregnant women in the study setting as well as in the country. Objectives: -The aim of the study was to assess the prevalence of cardiovascular diseases among the third trimester pregnant women who had antenatal care follow up at Jimma University Medical center from October 2021 to December 2021. Methods:-An institution based cross sectional study was conducted among pregnant women who had antenatal care follow up. Data was collected by using structured questionnaire; and it was then entered to Epi data and exported to SPSS Version 26 for statistical analysis. Descriptive data summarizations and presentations was done. Logistic regression was computed to assess statistical association, and significance of statistical association was considered to be significant if P-value ≤ 0.5. Result: - A total of 156 pregnant women were enrolled in this study. The overall prevalence of cardiovascular diseases was 16.7%; of which 10.3% had hypertensive disorders of pregnancy and 6.4% had cardiac diseases. Of those with hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, preeclampsia accounted for 6.4% followed by gestational hypertension (2.6%) and chronic hypertension (1.3%). Of those with cardiac diseases, chronic rheumatic heart disease accounted for 3.2%.atrial septal aneurysm (1.9%) and hypertensive heart disease (1.3%). In those with rheumatic heart disease, mitral valve lesions were the prominent finding. T wave abnormalities were the most common electrocardiography finding. Conclusion:-The prevalence of cardiovascular diseases among the third trimester pregnant women were high in the study institution. So, screening all pregnant women with electrocardiography and echocardiography is important.