Strengths and Limitations
First, this study’s major strength is exploring the association between pre-eclampsia/eclampsia and stroke in a nationwide scope cohort study. Second, this study reported the two different stroke subtypes and divided the long follow-up duration into different follow-up durations to provide information regarding the time-trend effects of pre-eclampsia/eclampsia on stroke. Finally, because of the large number of women in this nationwide study, we used exact matching to control all covariates, that is, women with the same age, same comorbidity distributions, and same socioeconomic status, which could reduce statistical bias in this study.
This study has several limitations. First, our health insurance database provides no information on laboratory data, nor the severity of pre-eclampsia/eclampsia. Second, smoking habits, alcohol consumption, or body weight/body mass index are not available in our database. Therefore, we could not evaluate the effects of these factors on stroke.