• Posted April 1, 2025

Pregnant Women, New Moms Dying More Often From Heart Conditions

The heart-related death rate among pregnant women and new mothers more than doubled between 1999 and 2022, researchers have found.

Just under 9.1 mothers for every million people died from heart-related diseases in 2022, up from 3.6 per million in 1999, according to results presented Sunday at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting in Chicago.

Black women and women living in Southern states are at the highest risk, researchers found.

“We’re heading in the wrong direction,” lead researcher Dr. Mohammad Ahabab Hossain, a resident physician at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in Newark, N.J., said in a news release.

“The United States is supposed to be a global leader in advancing health and medicine, and the fact that we still have pregnant women who are dying — often because of preventable causes — should sound alarm bells,” he said.

The new study looked at maternal mortality, or deaths that occur when a woman is pregnant or has recently given birth. It may include deaths that occur up to a year following delivery, if the cause of death is linked to pregnancy.

For the study, researchers analyzed U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data collected between 1999 and 2022 on women of reproductive age, 15 to 44, who died of heart-related causes.

Causes could include high blood pressure, dangerous blood clots, or conditions that weakened the heart’s pumping ability, researchers said.

The data showed especially high maternal death rates in 2020 and 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a peak of 10.5 deaths per million in 2021. This could be due to limited access to prenatal care or a hesitancy to visit medical clinics during lockdowns, researchers said.

Black women had about three times the maternal death rate of white women, 21.9 per million versus 7.1 per million, results show.

Likewise, Southern women had the highest death rate compared to those from any other U.S. region – 12.1 per million, compared to 5.4 per million in Western states.

Social and economic disadvantages, limited access to health care and more widespread heart health risk factors likely drive these higher rates in maternal deaths, researchers speculated.

“Part of the reason this is happening is because heart disease and hypertension are becoming more and more prevalent, as are the conditions that are connected to heart disease, like diabetes and obesity. As a result, we wind up with more high-risk pregnancies,” Hossain said.

“However, a lot of this is preventable,” he added. “If a patient has a history of hypertension or other preexisting cardiovascular disease, that patient should be connected with a high-risk obstetrics clinic to receive the care they need.”

Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The American Medical Association has more on U.S. maternal death rates.

SOURCE: American College of Cardiology, news release, March 25, 2025