Only 26.2% of hypertensive women receive contraceptive counseling

Key takeaway :

• Only 26.2% of hypertensive women received contraceptive counseling.
• Women with hypertension were 8.2% and 9.45% more likely to receive contraceptive counseling and to receive contraception than those without.

BALTIMORE — Just over a quarter of American women with high blood pressure who are at risk of unintended pregnancy received contraceptive counseling between 2015 and 2019, according to a poster presented at ACOG’s Annual Clinical and Scientific Meeting.

Using data from the National Survey of Family Growth from 2015 to 2017 and from 2017 to 2019, the researchers compared contraceptive advice and contraceptive use in the past year among 8,625 women with and without hypertension.

Overall, 8.7% of the women in the sample had hypertension. Contraceptive counseling was provided to 26.2% of women with hypertension and 20.7% of women without hypertension. In addition, the researchers observed contraceptive use among 39.8% of women with hypertension and 35.3% of women without hypertension.

“Women who have high blood pressure and are using some form of birth control, they are using the birth control pill, which is a pill that contains estrogen and is actually category three of the CDC medical eligibility criteria, which means that the Hypertensive patients should try to use another method. It can increase the risk of blood clots.” katherine a. panushkaDoctor in medicine, a resident in the department of obstetrics, gynecology and women’s health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, told Healio. “Category Three of the CDC Medical Eligibility Criteria means you should consider an alternate form of contraception if there is one that is appropriate for the patient. You would want to use something with progesterone.”

Women with hypertension were 8.2% more likely to receive contraceptive counseling and 9.4% more likely to receive contraception compared with women without hypertension. The most reported contraceptive method among hypertensive women were oral contraceptive pills with 54%.

According to the researchers, improving contraceptive administration among this patient population may provide an opportunity to prevent pregnancy-related morbidity given the association between hypertension and maternal health.

Most patients with hypertension had higher rates of contraceptive advice, except for black patients who had lower rates of contraceptive advice.

“We are currently working on a paper that is looking into this and looking at what that means implicit bias for patients who are black and have hypertension, and are receiving reduced rates of contraceptive counseling,” Panushka said.

Reference:

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Annual Clinical and Scientific Meeting of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology