The hypertensive complications of pregnancy are divided into four distinct classifications: Preeclampsia/eclampsia, Chronic hypertension, preeclampsia superimposed on chronic hypertension, and gestational hypertension. Many people are perplexed by the term "superimposed preeclampsia" which is preeclampsia complicating hypertension of another cause, most commonly chronic or "essential" hypertension. However women with hypertension associated with ...
ArticlesIs there a nutritional connection to preeclampsia? That idea seems plausible at first, as when the blood samples of women have been analyzed, some researchers have found altered levels of various vitamins and minerals. Furthermore, preeclamptic women have altered patterns of weight gain during pregnancy; and obese women are more likely to develop preeclampsia.
Such considerations may lead one to speculate that certain diets may prevent or reverse the disease, in which case the appropriate diet becomes a therapeutic intervention. However the best research to date suggests this just isn't so.
Currently there's no way to know for certain whether preeclampsia will develop during any given pregnancy. This leaves pregnant women and their care providers with little choice but to wait for symptoms to appear... dangerous symptoms that mean the disease has progressed to the point where mother and baby are critically ill and will need intensive monitoring and carefully timed delivery to protect their health and lives. The only screening method to date is to measure those symptoms when they appear. Early detection wouldn't be a treatment. But what if a screening test could let us know, weeks or even months in advance, that we'd probably be getting ill? Knowing might change the way we seek care - possibly choosing specialist care providers with the education and experience to manage medically complicated pregnancies. Women in parts of the world (like
A new study came out this month evaluating supplementation of l-arginine as a means of reducing preeclampsia risk. There was a lot of media coverage – you probably had friends and relatives sending you articles like this – and there’s been some discussion of it on the Preeclampsia Foundation forums as well. Why did researchers think this might work? Well, partly for the same reason that
When preeclampsia studies are reported in the news, there’s rarely enough background to evaluate, from the news article alone, how important the research is, or how strong the findings are, or how likely they are to lead to some sort of improvement in care or treatment of preeclampsia. That’s just a consequence of the way news reporting happens these days; preeclampsia is hard to explain, column inches are scarce, and science reporting divisions have largely been cut from media staff. |
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