Researchers Are Discovering How to Predict – and Maybe Treat — Pregnancy Complications Early On.

Researchers Are Discovering How to Predict – and Maybe Treat — Pregnancy Complications Early On.

Katie Love cradles her newborn daughter, born after a bout with preeclampsia.

Courtesy of Love

Katie Love wishes there was some way she could have been prepared. But there was no way to know, early in 2020, that her pregnancy would lead to terrifyingly high blood pressure and multiple hospital visits, ending in induced labor and a 56-hour-long, “nightmare” delivery at 37 weeks. Love, a social media strategist in Pittsburgh, had preeclampsia, a poorly understood and potentially deadly pregnancy complication that affects 1 in 25 pregnant women in the United States. But there was no blood test, no easy diagnostic marker to warn Love that this might happen. Even on her first visit to the emergency room, with sky-high blood pressure, doctors could not be certain preeclampsia was the cause.

In fact, the primary but imperfect indicators for preeclampsia — high blood pressure and protein in the urine — haven’t changed in decades. The Preeclampsia Foundation calls a simple, rapid test to predict or diagnose the condition “a key component needed in the fight.”

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Amber Dance
Amber Dance, PhD, is an award-winning freelance science journalist whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Nature, Science News, Knowable Magazine, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and The Scientist, among others.
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Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.

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Mass General Hospital

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