Read up on our latest news

Preventing preeclampsia — which affects about 5-7% of pregnant people worldwide every year — has benefits that stretch beyond pregnancy. Even if a pregnancy ends safely in a healthy birth, people with preeclampsia have more than twice the chance of developing cardiovascular disease later in life than those without it.

It’s up to policymakers to end the Black maternal health crisis. But in the meantime, with the right tools, Black moms can feel more secure approaching the medical system.

Pregnancy can be a roller coaster of screenings, tests, and health check-ups to ensure you and the baby are happy and healthy. One of these routine prenatal checks is the pregnancy glucose test, which screens for gestational diabetes. It's a relatively common condition that affects up to 10 percent of pregnancies in the United States every year, according to the CDC. But issues can arise with the baby's development if it goes undiagnosed.

Chad has the highest maternal mortality globally, in staggering contrast to the one in 16,000 risk that a 15-year-old child in Australia or New Zealand has, the region with the lowest risk. The WHO report released last week contains innumerable sobering facts such as this one, that seem as though they more easily could have come from a 1923 report than from 2023.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has released a draft recommendation stating all pregnant persons should have their BP measured at each prenatal visit to help identify and prevent complications of hypertension disorders.

Dr. Nick Van Terheyden of The Incrementalist podcast talks to Maneesh Jain, PhD CEO of Mirvie, that is bringing a level of personalization and safety to pregnancy with a revolutionary approach. Maneesh has an interesting back story that started as we unraveled the human genome and shares some important insights about that early work and the over-promised potential that was celebrated, but as he points out we had one, just one human genome sequenced.

The American Heart Association has released its 2023 Statistical Update and the results are grim: In 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, more people died from cardiovascular-related causes than ever before: a staggering 928,741 deaths. While there are many causes of this increase, one is the increased burden that Covid-19 wrought on individuals’ bodies and entire systems.

We often speak about the rising maternal mortality rate, but then we fail to dig into its underlying causes. We lack standardized reporting systems, such that different states track different outcomes using entirely different systems. We must view this as not only an opportunity for awareness, but also for action.

While maternal mortality is on the rise in the U.S., pregnancy health has seen little innovation in understanding the underlying biology of disease and is ripe for change. Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of the prediction of preeclampsia.

Of the nearly 1,000 pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. between 2017 and 2019, more than 80% of them could have been prevented, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on September 19.