Publications

According to the most recent recommendations, clinical obesity should now be recognized as a chronic disease. These recommendations also highlight the limitations of using body mass index (BMI) as a surrogate marker and emphasize the need to focus more on body fat distribution and markers of adipose tissue dysfunction. This paradigm shift is particularly timely given the significant global increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity, which is also affecting women of reproductive age. Overweight and obesity are associated with an increased risk of preeclampsia, a syndrome combining gestational hypertension and proteinuria in the second half of pregnancy. Although preeclampsia appears to be a maternal vascular response to placental dysfunction, an increasing amount of evidence suggests that maternal cardiovascular disease may contribute to or even cause placental dysfunction. Cardiovascular disease and preeclampsia share many common risk factors, including overweight and obesity, and women with preeclampsia face an elevated cardiovascular risk in the ensuing decades.