Hey what's going on guys and welcome to episode 29 of the physician

assistant boards dot-com podcast and today we're going to talk about hypertension

during pregnancy. Now hypertension during pregnancy is something I deal with. I see a lot of OB patients, so I see a lot of pregnant women who come in with either hypertension before they were pregnant, hypertension that develops during pregnancy, even hypertension that

develops postpartum.

Although that's a little bit less common, the majority are going to have hypertension

prior to coming into the pregnancy and then the problem is you know do we continue their treatment do we not continue their treatment do we need to switch their medications

so those are some things that we're going to talk about today. So first things first, we can

separate hypertension during pregnancy into a few categories, right? So we can actually separate

these into chronic hypertension. Now this is going to be

hypertension that was noted before 20 weeks gestation. So this is hypertension that

has that was present prior to the pregnancy.

And even if the hypertension develops maybe 10 weeks, 12 weeks into the pregnancy,

we still consider that chronic hypertension.

It's not until you hit that 20 week mark that we can actually say that you have

gestational hypertension, that we have hypertension caused because of the pregnancy.

Gestational hypertension starts over 20 weeks, but there cannot be any signs of end organ damage.

End organ damage, meaning any other signs and symptoms that you would look for in a normal hypertensive person, right?

So we're going to look for retinopathy.

We're going to look for protein in the urine.

You're going to look for LVH.

Now the main thing that you really want to look for is protein right now

because protein after 20 weeks to station this can actually mean pre-aclamcium. Now the

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