Pre-eclampsia almost doubles vascular dementia risk in later life: study

The findings underscore the importance of obstetric history when assessing a woman's cardiometabolic disease risk, say the study authors.

Women with a history of pre-eclampsia are nearly twice as likely to develop vascular dementia than those who had normotensive pregnancies, data from over two million women suggest.

This risk also increases with advancing age, though the association between pre-eclampsia and Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia was “less conclusive”, say authors from University College Cork in Ireland.