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Date: Wednesday, April 30, 1997 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Robert Bock (301) 496-5133
A team of investigators has discovered that preeclampsia--a life
threatening complication of pregnancy--results from a failure
of the placenta to invade the wall of the uterus and to appropriately
mimic the tissue which lines blood vessels. The finding has important
implications for the diagnosis and treatment of this sudden, mysterious,
and potentially fatal disorder of pregnancy.
The research, funded by the National Institute of Child Health
and Human Development, appears in two papers published in the
May 1 issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
About 7 percent of first-time mothers and 1 to 2 percent of mothers
having subsequent pregnancies develop preeclampsia. The condition
occurs suddenly, without warning, and sometimes in as little as
a few hours. Usually, a pregnant woman with preeclampsia develops
dangerously high blood pressure and begins excreting protein in
the urine. In some cases, the condition may progress to eclampsia,
a series of potentially fatal seizures.
Preeclampsia is still one of the leading causes of maternal mortality.
The need to screen for and detect preeclampsia early was one of
the original reasons the medical community began recommending
regular prenatal visits many years ago.
In cases where the condition does not progress to eclampsia, the
children born to mothers with preeclampsia may be extremely small
for their age or may be born prematurely. This may, in turn, place
them at risk for a variety of other complications of birth. Infants
born to mothers with preeclampsia may also grow more slowly during
infancy than infants whose mothers do not have the condition.
Although the high blood pressure accompanying preeclampsia can
be treated with blood pressure lowering drugs, the only effective
treatment for the condition is immediate delivery. Known risks
for preeclampsia are: diabetes, pre-existing hypertension, kidney
disease, being pregnant with twins, and having previously had
the condition during an earlier pregnancy.
An earlier study has shown that in women who develop preeclampsia, the placenta fails to penetrate the wall of the uterus adequately, explained the senior investigator of the research team, Susan J. Fisher, PhD, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.
In the current study, Fisher and her co-investigators, Caroline
Damsky, PhD and Yan Zhou, MD, determined that in normal pregnancies,
fingerlike projections of placental cells, known as cytotrophoblasts,
invade the inside wall of the uterus and then begin to mimic the
vascular (vein and artery) cells found on the inside of blood
vessels. Eventually, these placental projections break down the
vessels, allowing the placenta to be bathed in maternal blood.
This blood carries oxygen and nutrients to the placenta, and carries
away fetal wastes.
In preeclampsia, however, few cytotrophoblast projections invade
the uterine wall to the proper depth. Moreover, these projections
remain in their early state of differentiation and fail to take
on the characteristics of blood vessel cells.
Currently, the researchers are unsure exactly why, during preeclampsia,
the placental cells fail to mimic blood vessel cells. However,
in an earlier study of cells in laboratory dishes, the researchers
have found that, under low oxygen conditions, cytotrophoblasts
also fail to invade. Dr. Fisher cautioned that although preeclampsia
could result from a variety of possible causes, clues to the nature
of the disorder might be found in mothers who have conditions
predisposing them to lower blood oxygen levels.
"This finding is a major advance in understanding this mysterious condition,"
said the project officer for the study, Don McNellis, MD, of the
NICHD's pregnancy and perinatology branch."Knowing
the cellular pathology of the disease will help immensely in the
search for ways to diagnose and treat it."
Because preeclampsia often occurs without warning in otherwise
healthy pregnant women, Dr. McNellis explained, a test for the
disorder would allow physicians to target those women with preeclampsia
and intervene as early as possible.
Dr. Fisher theorized that the failure of invading cytotrophoblasts to take on the characteristics of blood vessel cells may provoke a reaction in the circulatory system of the mother, resulting in high blood pressure and causing blood vessel damage.
In the first paper they published, the researchers described how
they had placed cytotrophoblasts in laboratory cultures that resembled
the walls of the uterus. As they differenetiated, the cytotrophoblasts
took on characteristics of the cells that line the walls of veins
and arteries. In the second paper, the researchers reported that
samples of placental tissue taken from women who developed preeclampsia
had failed to adequately mimic the lining of blood vessels, whereas
the placental tissue samples from normal pregnancy did indeed
mimic blood vessel lining.