Study design and population
A retrospective cohort study was conducted on pregnancies and the
corresponding incidence of genital malformationsin male neonates atthe
International Peace Maternal and Child Health Hospital (affiliated
withthe Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine) from January
2015 to December 2019 to observe the effect of hypertensive disorder in
pregnancy on the development of neonatal hypospadias. Every step was
carried out in accordance with the relevant guidelines. Ethics approval
and use of clinical data for research purposes was granted by the Ethics
Committees of the International Peace Maternity and Child Health
Hospital. Patients with pregnancies who registered and obtained routine
prenatal examinationsat our hospital and their male infants were
enrolled in this study, including male infants with hypospadias
diagnosed by neonatologists using clinical observations documented at
birth. The analysis excluded pregnancies whose newborns had
malformations other than hypospadias;these non-malformation infants and
their mothers were used as the normal controls. Basedon the timing of
the occurrence of hypertension, the pregnancies were divided into three
groups: chronic hypertension (CH, hypertension appeared before 20 weeks
gestation), pregnancy-induced hypertension (PIH, including gestational
hypertension, pre-eclampsia, and eclampsia) and normal control groups
(women without hypertension, proteinuria, or evidence of edema). For the
risk factor analysis, the pregnancies were divided into a hypospadias
group and a non-malformation group. This clinical study has been
registered at .