Strengths and Limitations
Our study has several strengths, including a large study population and
the advanced timing of blood parameters measurements, while conventional
obstetric examinations were generally taken place before 20 weeks of
gestation. The results of our work may provide clinical evidence for
considering maternal risk factors when setting hypertension diagnostic
thresholds and conducting possible preventive therapies. Nevertheless,
this study had several limitations. A major limitation of our study is
the use of blood pressure measurements during pregnancy for
classification of stage 1 hypertension, since pre-pregnancy blood
pressure measurements are ideal for chronic hypertension diagnoses.
Second, we did a retrospective and single-center cohort study, and the
study didn’t include the low-resource settings, which would prevent its
extrapolation to nationwide. Third, personal information such as social
status and family income were not available in this study, and
therefore, the residents/immigrants’ status was used instead.