Lots of pregnancies linked to a healthier heart

In a new study from a single California community, women who had been pregnant at least four times were less likely to die from cardiovascular disease than those who'd never been expecting.

Researchers said that could be due to the protective effects of pregnancy-related hormones as well as the extra social support that comes with having more children - or the fact that women who are able to get pregnant more often are healthier to begin with.

It's not clear that getting pregnant more often protects women's hearts, necessarily.

"It's just one more little piece of the puzzle that maybe physicians should be aware of or think about," said Donna Kritz-Silverstein, from the University of California, San Diego.

"Heart disease is one of the biggest problems facing women today. It's the leading cause of death among women in the United States," Kritz-Silverstein, who worked on the study, told Reuters Health. But, she added, "Many women don't perceive themselves to be at risk."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease kills more than 600,000 Americans a year, about half of them women.

The new study, led by Marni Jacobs at UCSD, involved close to 1,300 women from Rancho Bernardo in Southern California. In the mid-1980s, when participants were in their early 70s, on average, researchers asked them how many times they had been pregnant and given birth. They also surveyed women about lifestyle habits related to heart health, such as smoking and exercise, and measured their cholesterol, blood pressure, height and weight.

If you have a heart condition, what should you do before planning a pregnancy?

If you have a heart condition, such as those listed below, you should be evaluated by a cardiologist (a heart specialist) before you start planning a pregnancy:

Hypertension (high blood pressure) or high cholesterol
Prior diagnosis of any type of heart or blood vessel disease, including aorta disease, arrhythmia, heart murmur, cardiomyopathy, heart failure, Marfan syndrome or rheumatic fever.
Prior cardiac event (transient ischemic attack or stroke).
Poor functional status, defined as NYHA class III or IV. The New York Heart Association (NYHA) functional status is a set of clinical classifications that rank patients as class I-II-III-IV according to the degree of symptomatic or functional limits or cyanosis (a blue tint to the skin, indicates the body is not receiving enough oxygen-rich blood).
Severe narrowing of the mitral or aortic valve or aortic outflow tract, as determined by echocardiography.
Ejection fraction of less than 40%. Ejection fraction is the amount of blood pumped out of the left ventricle during each heartbeat. The ejection fraction evaluates how well the heart is pumping. A normal ejection fraction ranges from 50 to 70%.