Postpartum checkups are necessary for all patients, but this study indicates they are particularly important for patients who undergo infertility treatment to achieve a conception, says a study author Infertility treatment patients were twice as likely to be hospitalised with heart disease in the year following delivery as spontaneously conceived patients, according to a study conducted by Rutgers Health experts using more than 31 million hospital records. Infertility patients were 2.16 times more likely to be hospitalised for hypertension, or dangerously elevated blood pressure than normally conceived patients.
"Postpartum checkups are necessary for all patients, but this study indicates they are particularly important for patients who undergo infertility treatment to achieve a conception," said Rei Yamada, an obstetrics and gynaecology resident at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and lead author of the study. The study authors say their results support standards of care that now call for an initial postpartum checkup three weeks after delivery, standards that some health systems have yet to adopt. Much of the elevated risk came in the first month after delivery, particularly for patients who developed dangerously high blood pressure.
"And these results aren't the only ones to indicate that follow-up should occur early," said Cande Ananth, chief of the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences .