MIRAMAR, Fla. – There’s some encouraging news for women with multiple sclerosis who undergo fertility treatment.
Fertility specialist Dr. Maria Facadio Antero with Conceptions Florida said a recent study found that fertility treatment was not associated with an increased risk of relapse in women with MS.
“So basically they looked at women with MS undergoing fertility treatments and a variety of fertility treatments not just IVF but also ovulation induction and embryo transfers and then they compared their relapsing rate 12 months before they had treatment to their relapse rate three months after the treatment and they didn’t see any difference,” she said.
Because MS tends to develop in women of childbearing age, Antero said reproductive concerns are an important part of disease management.
And according to the CDC, rates of hypertension disorders in pregnancy are on the rise.
Experts say there are three types of high blood pressure disorders during pregnancy that are most common.
“We have chronic hypertension. This is a woman who was given a diagnosis of hypertension even when she was not pregnant, or who was diagnosed with hypertension before the 20 week of pregnancy. That is chronic hypertension. Then we have gestational hypertension, as the word gestation, this is hypertension after 20 weeks of pregnancy. And this can now continue from gestational hypertension to become what we call preeclampsia,” said Dr. Tosin Goje, an obstetrician-gynecologist with Cleveland Clinic.
According to the CDC, preeclampsia occurs in around one in 25 pregnancies.
High blood pressure is seen in every 12 to 17 pregnancies among women in the US.
The risk rises with the age of the mother.