Reducing diabetes and heart disease risk in women following high-risk pregnancies through optimising lifestyle management and cardiometabolic screening

Certain pregnancy related-conditions indicate an increased risk of heart disease later in life for women. These cardio-metabolic conditions include placental disorders, including hypertensive disorders (gestational hypertension or pre-eclampsia), fetal growth restriction, gestational diabetes and spontaneous preterm birth. Guidelines exist for some of these conditions to reduce the risk of heart disease following pregnancy including additional screening for risk factors for diabetes or heart disease and lifestyle management to optimise diet, physical activity and weight. However, these guidelines are poorly taken up by women and health professionals. There are also clinical gaps where we don’t know how to identify women with these conditions at the highest risk of later heart disease. Improving these gaps will thus reduce the risk of heart disease for these high-risk women later in life. We have completed a large scale Heart Foundation MRFF Grant in reducing cardio-metabolic risk of Australian women through optimising screening and lifestyle management during and following pregnancy. We now seek to formally evaluate this intervention, garner learnings for implementation and scale up into routine care, explore different modalities of intensity and follow up women in the initial trial for longer-term cardiometabolic outcomes. The student could be involved in a number of the different project components (as desired) across stakeholder engagement and implementation research, mixed methods and qualitative research, biostatistical analysis and risk prediction, intervention design and clinical trials. The student would join a thriving internationally leading multidisciplinary women’s health team working across clinical care and research.