Abstract:

Background: Pregnancy induced hypertension (PIH) is classified as gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, severe preeclampsia or eclampsia. Preeclampsia is diagnosed as hypertension of equal or greater than 140/90 mmHg with proteinuria of 1+ or 2+ on dipstick in two samples 6 hours apart or greater than 0.3 grams in a 24 hour urine collection at the gestation age of twenty weeks or more. Eclampsia is defined as seizure/fits occurring in patients with preeclampsia and a non proteinuria rise in blood pressure is known as gestation hypertension. It afflicts 3 – 5% of pregnancies and is a leading cause of maternal mortality, especially in developing countries; it results to infant morbidity and substantially health healthcare expenditure.

Methods: This was a retrospective comparative hospital based study, between pregnant women with PIH in comparison with normotensive ones and also mode of delivery and outcome compared between women with PIH themselves. Data on the medical history, socio-demographic data, decision making on mode of delivery and pregnancy outcome were obtained from patients file and partopraphs.

Results: In six thousand pregnant women were involved in this study the overall prevalence of PIH is 4.02 percent (241 out of 6000) of majority of them (56.4%) were primgravidae. The majority of patients 43.2% had moderate hypertension ranging from 141/111 mmHg, 28.2% had severe hypertension, 18.3 had mild hypertension and 10% had very severe hypertension. About 46.9% of patients delivered at gestation are ranging between 38 weeks and 41 weeks and 9.5% delivered with gestation age between 20 weeks and less than 28 weeks. Among the pregnant women who had PIH, 74.9% age ranged from fifteen to thirty years old and 85.3% of women who had PIH delivered by spontaneous vaginal delivery. Outcome of deliveries were 7.8% big baby followed by low birth weight 6.8%.

Conclusion: The prevalence of PIH is high in primgravidae compared to multiparous women and it decreases with the number of parity, teenage and young adults are more susceptible to PIH than adults. Fetus is likely to suffers more complications of PIH than maternal and among the fatal complications includes: low birth weight, very low birth weight, intra uterine fatal death and death after delivery. However having a big fetus has shown a strong association with the development of PIH.