High Blood Pressure in Pregnancy Surged 73% in Just Eight Years

A Startling Rise in a Dangerous Condition

One in 10 pregnant women in the United States had high blood pressure in 2024, up from one in 17 in 2016 — a 73% increase in just eight years. The numbers, released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday, July 29, are raising urgent alarms among doctors and public health officials. This isn't a modest statistical uptick. It's a generational shift in how pregnancy looks in America — and the consequences can be deadly.

Hypertensive disorders in pregnancy "are common pregnancy complications and are among the leading causes of maternal morbidity and mortality in the United States," according to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. High blood pressure during pregnancy increases the risk of serious issues, including organ damage or failure, placental abruption, preterm birth, low birth weight, and stillbirth. Beyond the immediate pregnancy, women who develop the condition also face a greater lifetime risk of heart disease.

No Single Group Is Spared

What makes this data particularly troubling is its reach. Doctors say they're seeing the increase in every age group, racial category, and region — and the rate even doubled among underweight women. Rates rose within every age and BMI group studied, suggesting that older maternal age and higher BMI alone don't fully explain the increase. In other words, the usual risk factors don't account for the full picture.

The rate of new-onset hypertensive disorders of pregnancy increased significantly from 2016 to 2024 across all racial and ethnic groups. HDP rates were highest among American Indian or Alaska Native women. The breadth of the trend — cutting across demographics, geographies, and body types — points to something systemic happening in the broader environment, not just in individual patients.

What's Driving the Surge?

The CDC report doesn't identify a specific cause, but researchers are examining whether pollution and microplastics may affect pregnancy health — one OB hospitalist has cited such environmental exposures as her hypothesis for the broader increase in chronic disease among pregnant patients. That theory remains unproven, but it reflects the growing sense among clinicians that something external and widespread is at work.

Dr. Elizabeth K. Cherot, an obstetrician-gynecologist, told The New York Times that the report's numbers mark "a substantial rise" in pregnancy hypertension. Earlier research found a similar increase in hypertensive pregnancies in Canada, suggesting this may not be a uniquely American problem. And the true scale of the crisis may be even larger than reported: the actual rate is probably even higher because birth certificates, used to inform this report, don't capture every case of gestational hypertension, the CDC says.

Why This Matters Beyond the Delivery Room

The report did not include high blood pressure that was diagnosed before pregnancy, which also affects many women and is rising. That means the full burden of hypertension on pregnant women in the U.S. is almost certainly larger than what these numbers show. The data captures only what develops during pregnancy — a deliberately narrow lens that still produced a staggering result.

For the medical community, the data is a call to prioritize blood pressure monitoring and early intervention in prenatal care. For policymakers, it underscores the need to understand and address the environmental and systemic factors that may be reshaping pregnancy risk. Researchers have noted that inaccurate and inconsistent blood pressure measurement across the lifespan remains a major barrier to hypertension diagnosis, management, and risk reduction — a gap that, given these numbers, the country can no longer afford to ignore.