Cerebral biomarkers to find neurological complications of preeclampsia

Eclampsia and other cerebral complications of preeclampsia including cerebral edema, ischaemia and haemorrhage are leading causes of maternal morbidity and mortality. Preeclampsia usually seen after 20 weeks of pregnancy in women whose blood pressure had been normal but leaving it untreated, it can lead to serious, even fatal complications for both mother and baby.

So far there are no tools to accurately predict who is at risk of developing neurological complications of preeclampsia nor any objective methods to determine disease severity. A recent study assessed whether plasma levels of the cerebral biomarkers neurofilament light (NfL), tau and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) could reflect disease severity in various phenotypes of preeclampsia and compared them to the angiogenic biomarkers soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase 1 (sFlt-1), placental growth factor (PlGF), and soluble endoglin (sEng) .