When you are pregnant, get up slowly from the sitting position and avoid becoming too hot at any time.



Drink plenty of fluids and take a little extra salt with your food but certainly not excessive amounts as this can be harmful for your baby.

Low blood pressure is particularly suffered by women for some reason. Female sex hormones produced during pregnancy lead to widening of the blood vessels in the skin and a degree of physiological anaemia in all women, which has the affect of increasing the feeling of dizziness and faintness.

Poor prenatal outcomes have also been considered as associated with low blood pressure during pregnancy.

A large potential cohort study by the name of Collaborative Prenatal Project was conducted from 1959 to 1966 in 12 hosptials of United States. A total of 28,095 subjects were included. Initially, it was observed that the lower the baseline blood pressure during pregnancy, the higher the incidence of very premature birth (34 weeks) and severe small for gestational age in a consistent dose-response pattern. Women whose blood pressure readings showed low blood pressure were generally poorer, shorter, leaner, younger, underweight and more often a minority.

When these factors were controlled for those women, low blood pressure was no more associated with preterm birth or small for gestational age. Hence, this was proved that the association between poor prenatal outcomes and low blood pressure during pregnancy is largely due to confounding by other risk factors.

Although, it was proved that low blood pressure by itself does not increase risk of poor prenatal outcomes at a population level, but this may not apply to the patients with a compromised plasma volume expansion or pathologic homeostasis.