Cardiac changes in pregnancy unrelated to the usual etiological types of heart disease

Abstract

The frequency with which symptoms and signs of cardiac failure appear ante partum and post partum in women who had no evidence of heart disease before becoming pregnant is not known. Observation of such patients has prompted the present report. These patients were found by examining women who, at the time they became pregnant, had apparently normal hearts, and by selecting from obstetric cardiac patients those who did not have the usual types of heart disease. The report is necessarily incomplete, for it represents only those patients observed personally. The findings were grouped arbitrarily, as follows: (1) physiologic changes, including so-called “gestatory heart diseae”; (2) changes dependent upon toxemia and nephritis; and (3) post-partum heart failure. A preliminary report of some of these observations has already been given, 1 and certain aspects of the post-partum group have been described. 2