A heart-shaped uterus, or bicornuate uterus, is a rare uterine abnormality that can cause complications during pregnancy and childbirth. It is often only discovered when a woman experiences these complications, but can be diagnosed through methods such as ultrasound or hysteroscopy.
A heart-shaped uterus is a type of uterine abnormality that causes a woman’s uterus to look more like a heart than the natural pear shape that a healthy uterus exhibits. Statistically, this type of anomaly, also known as a bicornuate uterus or bicornuate uterus, is present in very few women. Generally, the bicornuate uterus presents no problem to affected women until they become pregnant or try to deliver their babies. Complications of pregnancy and childbirth are often the only reasons women and their doctors discover heart-shaped uteruses. For this reason, it’s possible that more women than studies show have bicornuate uteruses.
A woman’s uterus takes on the shape of a heart when an indentation in the top of the uterus, called the fundus, creates two distinctly separate sides, often referred to as the horns. Most healthy uteruses are shaped like a pear, but the horns of a bicornuate uterus make it look like a heart. This defect occurs when the woman is still in the uterus and her embryonic female genital tract does not develop properly. Research suggests that about one in 250 women in the United States has some sort of uterine abnormality, including a bicornuate uterus. Because many uterine abnormalities aren’t diagnosed until another related or unrelated problem arises, some experts believe that such research does not accurately represent the number of women with uterine abnormalities.
Most of the complications associated with a heart-shaped uterus are related to pregnancy and childbirth complications. Usually, having a heart-shaped uterus doesn’t make it difficult for a woman to get pregnant, but it can make it difficult for her to carry the baby to full term. If the baby implants in the largest part of the uterus, rather than either horn, the woman may have a full-term pregnancy, but the baby may be breech or transverse and may require a cesarean delivery. Additionally, having a heart-shaped uterus can affect your baby’s development, causing fetal growth retardation, premature labor, or other birth defects. Of the three, premature birth appears to be the most common.
Typically, a woman and her doctor won’t know she has a heart-shaped uterus until she becomes pregnant and has complications during pregnancy or delivery. This is because most of the obvious symptoms of a heart-shaped uterus involve complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Even so, there are methods of diagnosing or discovering a bicornuate uterus that don’t involve pregnancy. Such methods include gynecological ultrasound, hysterosalpingography and hysteroscopy. Because doctors usually don’t do these procedures unless other problems, such as infertility, are present, most women aren’t aware of the problem until they become pregnant.
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