Placental Pathology as a Tool to Identify Women for Postpartum Cardiovascular Risk Screening following Preeclampsia: A Preliminary Investigation

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Abstract

Preeclampsia (PE) is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in later life. Postpartum cardiovascular risk screening could identify patients who would benefit most from early intervention and lifestyle modification. However, there are no readily available methods to identify these high-risk women. We propose that placental lesions may be useful in this regard. Here, we determine the association between placental lesions and lifetime CVD risk assessed 6 months following PE. Placentas from 85 PE women were evaluated for histopathological lesions. At 6 months postpartum, a lifetime cardiovascular risk score was calculated. Placental lesions were compared between CVD risk groups and the association was assessed using odds ratios. Multivariable logistic regression was used to develop prediction models for CVD risk with placental pathology. Placentas from high-risk women had more severe lesions of maternal vascular malperfusion (MVM) and resulted in a 3-fold increased risk of screening as high-risk for CVD (OR 3.10 (1.20–7.92)) compared to women without these lesions. MVM lesion severity was moderately predictive of high-risk screening (AUC 0.63 (0.51, 0.75); sensitivity 71.8% (54.6, 84.4); specificity 54.7% (41.5, 67.3)). When clinical parameters were added, the model’s predictive performance improved (AUC 0.73 (0.62, 0.84); sensitivity 78.4% (65.4, 87.5); specificity 51.6% (34.8, 68.0)). The results suggest that placenta pathology may provide a unique modality to identify women for cardiovascular screening.

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Preeclampsia

Sarosh Rana, Elizabeth Lemoine, Joey P. Granger … (2019)

Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy-chronic hypertension, gestational hypertension, and preeclampsia-are uniquely challenging as the pathology and its therapeutic management simultaneously affect mother and fetus, sometimes putting their well-being at odds with each other. Preeclampsia, in particular, is one of the most feared complications of pregnancy. Often presenting as new-onset hypertension and proteinuria during the third trimester, preeclampsia can progress rapidly to serious complications, including death of both mother and fetus. While the cause of preeclampsia is still debated, clinical and pathological studies suggest that the placenta is central to the pathogenesis of this syndrome. In this review, we will discuss the current evidence for the role of abnormal placentation and the role of placental factors such as the antiangiogenic factor, sFLT1 (soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase 1) in the pathogenesis of the maternal syndrome of preeclampsia. We will discuss angiogenic biomarker assays for disease-risk stratification and for the development of therapeutic strategies targeting the angiogenic pathway. Finally, we will review the substantial long-term cardiovascular and metabolic risks to mothers and children associated with gestational hypertensive disorders, in particular, preterm preeclampsia, and the need for an increased focus on interventional studies during the asymptomatic phase to delay the onset of cardiovascular disease in women.

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Pre-eclampsia: pathophysiology and clinical implications

Graham J. Burton, Christopher W G Redman, James Roberts … (2019)

Pre-eclampsia is a common disorder that particularly affects first pregnancies. The clinical presentation is highly variable but hypertension and proteinuria are usually seen. These systemic signs arise from soluble factors released from the placenta as a result of a response to stress of syncytiotrophoblast. There are two sub-types: early and late onset pre-eclampsia, with others almost certainly yet to be identified. Early onset pre-eclampsia arises owing to defective placentation, whilst late onset pre-eclampsia may center around interactions between normal senescence of the placenta and a maternal genetic predisposition to cardiovascular and metabolic disease. The causes, placental and maternal, vary among individuals. Recent research has focused on placental-uterine interactions in early pregnancy. The aim now is to translate these findings into new ways to predict, prevent, and treat pre-eclampsia.

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A new and improved population-based Canadian reference for birth weight for gestational age.

M Kramer, R W Platt, S Wen … (2001)

Existing fetal growth references all suffer from 1 or more major methodologic problems, including errors in reported gestational age, biologically implausible birth weight for gestational age, insufficient sample sizes at low gestational age, single-hospital or other non-population-based samples, and inadequate statistical modeling techniques. We used the newly developed Canadian national linked file of singleton births and infant deaths for births between 1994 and 1996, for which gestational age is largely based on early ultrasound estimates. Assuming a normal distribution for birth weight at each gestational age, we used the expectation-maximization algorithm to exclude infants with gestational ages that were more consistent with 40-week births than with the observed gestational age. Distributions of birth weight at the corrected gestational ages were then statistically smoothed. The resulting male and female curves provide smooth and biologically plausible means, standard deviations, and percentile cutoffs for defining small- and large-for-gestational-age births. Large-for-gestational age cutoffs (90th percentile) at low gestational ages are considerably lower than those of existing references, whereas small-for-gestational-age cutoffs (10th percentile) postterm are higher. For example, compared with the current World Health Organization reference from California (Williams et al, 1982) and a recently proposed US national reference (Alexander et al, 1996), the 90th percentiles for singleton males at 30 weeks are 1837 versus 2159 and 2710 g. The corresponding 10th percentiles at 42 weeks are 3233 versus 3086 and 2998 g. This new sex-specific, population-based reference should improve clinical assessment of growth in individual newborns, population-based surveillance of geographic and temporal trends in birth weight for gestational age, and evaluation of clinical or public health interventions to enhance fetal growth. fetal growth, birth weight, gestational age, preterm birth, postterm birth.