Changes of Arterial Pulse Waveform Characteristics with Gestational Age during Normal Pregnancy

Arterial pulse waveform analysis has been widely used to refect physiological changes in the cardiovascular system. This study aimed to comprehensively investigate the changes of waveform characteristics of both photoplethysmographic (PPG) and radial pulses with gestational age during normal pregnancy. PPG and radial pulses were simultaneously recorded from 130 healthy pregnant women at seven gestational time points. After normalizing the arterial pulse waveforms, the abscissa of notch point, the total pulse area and the refection index were extracted and compared between diferent measurement points and between the PPG and radial pulses using post-hoc multiple comparisons with Bonferrioni correction. The results showed that the efect of gestational age on all the three waveform characteristics was signifcant (all p<0.001) after adjusting for maternal age, heart rate and blood pressures. All the three waveform characteristics demonstrated similar changing trends with gestational age, and they were all signifcantly diferent between the measurements from gestational week 12–15 and the others (all p<0.05, except for the PPG total pulse area between the first and second measurement points). In conclusion, this study has comprehensively quantifed similar changes of both PPG and radial pulse waveform characteristics with gestational age.