A simple blood test could save new mothers. Why aren’t more doctors using it?

Brianna Henderson remembers staring at a doctor in shock as he told her that she was in heart failure. Her condition was called peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM), he explained, a unique form of cardiovascular disease that develops during late pregnancy or just after birth. It was 2016, and Henderson, who lives in Grand Prairie, Texas, had delivered her second child just six weeks earlier. A persistent cough, a racing pulse, and frightening shortness of breath had brought her to the ER, where she learned that her heart was dangerously weak, pumping at less than half its normal strength. She was 23 years old.