Although smaller differences in blood pressure reference
ranges were seen between smoking groups (up to
2 mmHg), they suggest that smoking status may be useful
to include, along with prepregnancy BMI, in prediction
models which use deviations from each woman’s expected
blood pressure trajectory to identify high-risk pregnancies.
In our previous study, we found strong statistical evidence
to support lower average blood pressure trajectories for
smokers than for nonsmokers [10], and other cohorts have
supported this finding for DBP, although findings relating
to SBP have been conflicting [9,14,27]. It has been shown
that blood pressure tracks moderately across pregnancy,
with almost 50% of women remaining in the same third of