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.