Ways to prevent preeclampsia, finds a study?

Preeclampsia is a mysterious condition that occurs in about one of 10 pregnancies without any early warning signs. After 20 weeks or more of normal blood pressure during the pregnancy, patients with preeclampsia will begin to experience elevated blood pressure and may also have increased levels of protein in their urine due to hypertension reducing the filtering power of the kidneys. Prolonged hypertension due to preeclampsia can lead to organ damage and life-threatening complications for mothers and fetuses.

There is no cure for the underlying causes of preeclampsia, so physicians focus on managing and monitoring patients’ blood pressure to allow for as close to a full-term gestation as possible. With severe disease, pre-term deliveries are necessary.

MCW scientists published results on a study of one of the emerging theories for what causes preeclampsia in Science Advances in December 2023. The experiments focus on a particular layer of cells of the placenta called the syncytiotrophoblast (STB), which is a key part of the barrier between the mother and developing fetus. This blockade helps keep a mother’s fully formed immune system from reacting to the fetus and potentially responding as if the fetus was a foreign threat such as a viral or bacterial invader.

The barrier also works in reverse to keep the fetus’s growing immune system from reacting to its mother’s cells and tissues. The study’s authors investigated the hypothesis that an abnormal amount of cellular and molecular stresses to the STB can damage the placenta and lead to preeclampsia.

“With our unique model, we can study the effects of contributing factors to preeclampsia throughout pregnancy,” Dr. Grobe says. “We can test specific signaling cascades in specific cells and tissues at specific times to observe their effects. We have only scratched the surface on what we can learn.”

Reference: Can preeclampsia be prevented?; Science Advances; DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adg8118