Pre-pregnancy blood pressure and body mass index trajectories and incident hypertensive disorders of pregnancy

There are few studies examining patterns in body mass index (BMI) and blood pressure (BP) and subsequent hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDPs). We examined the association of BMI (n = 1342) or BP (n = 2266) trajectories in the 5 years preceding birth with HDPs using adjusted logistic regression. Compared to normal-weight BMI and low-normal BP groups, membership to the overweight BMI group (OR: 2.95, 95% CI: 1.57-5.53, p = 0.001) and higher-normal (OR: 2.74, 95% CI: 1.49-5.04, p = 0.001) and prehypertensive (OR: 7.27, 95% CI: 3.29-16.06, p < 0.001) BP groups were associated with higher odds of HDPs. Our data suggest maintaining normal-weight and low-normal BP in the years preceding pregnancy may help avoid HDPs.