Blood Pressure Change in Normotensive, Gestational Hypertens

[caryn]

Our findings indicate notable patterns of BP change that distinguish women with essential hypertension, gestational hypertension, and preeclampsia from each other and from normotensive women, even from early pregnancy. These distinct patterns may be useful for identifying women at risk of developing a hypertensive disorder later in pregnancy.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22526257

Math FTW! If we sort women into groups after the fact and look at their bp readings during pregnancy, there's a clear difference between the groups. Blood pressure readings from women in the set of normotensive pregnancies make one distinctive curve, chronics another, women with gestational hypertension another, and women with preeclampsia another. (Question: what do superimposed preeclamptics look like?)

So. If those curves are robust - if they hold up in further testing - then they can start mapping our pressure readings against "standard curves", and see which curve we're tracking the most closely. That could give us a much earlier diagnosis, and move us to the set of women who are high-risk for complications even before the complications develop. Yay!

[LauraBeck12]

Did you see this? i thought if any one could break it down into human terms it would be you! <3 :

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... od=mostpop

http://hyper.ahajournals.org/content/ea ... 0.abstract

[caryn]

Yes - and I'm working on it, but epigenetics is tricky to explain in English. One of these days...