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

Oscar Galván-Valencia; Alison P Sanders; Ana Carolina Ariza; Heather H Burris; Eduardo Ortiz-Panozo; Katherine Svensson; Adriana Mercado-García; Martha Maria Téllez-Rojo; Robert O Wright; Marcela Tamayo-Ortiz

doi:10.1038/s41372-024-01909-3

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 Mar 5. doi: 10.1038/s41372-024-01909-3. Online ahead of print.

Affiliations

¹ Center for Nutrition and Health Research, National Institute of Public Health, Cuernavaca, Mexico.
² Environmental and Occupational Health, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
³ Center for Nutrition and Health Research, National Institute of Public Health, Cuernavaca, Mexico. carolina.ariza@insp.mx.
⁴ Division of Neonatology, Department of Pediatrics, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
⁵ Center for Population Health Research, National Institute of Public Health, Cuernavaca, Mexico.
⁶ Department of Health Sciences, Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden.
⁷ Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.
⁸ Environmental Health Sciences Department, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.

PMID: 38443464
DOI: 10.1038/s41372-024-01909-3

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.