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Associations of salivary aldosterone levels during pregnancy with maternal blood pressure and birth weight-for-gestational age in a Mexico City birth cohort

Abstract

Objective

To determine associations of maternal salivary aldosterone with blood pressure (BP) in pregnancy and infant birth weight-for-gestational age (BWGA).

Methods

We measured maternal salivary aldosterone, BP and BWGA z-scores in 471 Mexico City pregnancy cohort participants and performed multivariable linear regression of BP and BWGA on log-aldosterone levels.

Results

Log-aldosterone was positively associated with diastolic BP (β = 0.12 95% CI: 0.04, 0.21). There were no main effects of log-aldosterone on BWGA. However, we detected an interaction between log-aldosterone and BP in association with BWGA; higher log-aldosterone was associated with lower BWGA in the lowest (β = −0.12, 95% CI: -0.26, 0.02) and highest (β = −0.12, 95% CI: −0.29, 0.06) BP tertiles. In contrast, in the middle BP tertile the association was positive (β = 0.09, 95% CI: −0.02, 0.20), p for interaction = 0.03.

Conclusion

Higher maternal salivary aldosterone is positively associated with diastolic BP and may affect fetal growth differently depending on concurrent maternal blood pressure.

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Fig. 1: Associations of maternal salivary aldosterone with systolic and diastolic blood pressures in the second trimester; effect estimates per SD increment of log-transformed aldosterone.

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Data availability

The data used to support the findings of this study is available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Funding

This work was supported in part by funding from the NIH/NIEHS: R01ES01744-13, 1R24ES028522-03, R01ES013744, and R01ES014930.

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The authors’ responsibilities were as follows: designed the original study and follow-up as a birth cohort; ROW, MMTR, MTO, ASP; investigation and data curation KS, AMG and HB; conceptualized, designed and conducted secondary analyses; OGV, MTO, EOP, HB and ACA; OGV and EOP performed the statistical analysis; OGV, ACA, MTO and HB wrote the initial drafts; OGV, MTO, EOP, ACA and MMTR contributed substantially to analyses interpretation and subsequent drafts, and all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ana Carolina Ariza.

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Galván-Valencia, O., Sanders, A.P., Ariza, A.C. et al. Associations of salivary aldosterone levels during pregnancy with maternal blood pressure and birth weight-for-gestational age in a Mexico City birth cohort. J Perinatol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41372-024-01909-3

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