Up to 10% of babies across the world are born before the full 37 weeks of pregnancy are completed. This is known as preterm birth, and large-scale studies have found that people born preterm are at risk of developing heart disease as they reach young adulthood.
A team led by Dr Adam Lewandowski (Radcliffe Department of Medicine) is working to understand how the heart and vascular system develops differently in these people throughout their life-span, compared to their peers born after a full-term pregnancy. Dr Lewandowski and others have previously shown that people born preterm, as a group, have altered left ventricular structure and function of the heart, as well as a higher blood pressure. But the relationship between these two factors was still unclear.
Now, in a study published in JAMA Cardiology, Dr Lewandowski and his team studied magnetic resonance images of the heart from 468 young adults. Two hundred of these adults were born preterm.
Read the full article on the Radcliffe Department of Medicine website.