A group of researchers from Canada seems to have found the key to curing preeclampsia. It is not that they have found, as they say, something that will improve the treatment of hypertension typical of pregnancy, but it is something that goes much further: it will help to overcome it. The story of the discovery is most curious.
The scientists, a team that seeks solutions against Alzheimer’s, have developed an antibody that acts against one of the two fundamental proteins in this and other neurological disorders, P-tau. During the research they had the idea of testing it with mice that suffered from preeclampsia and they had “surprising” luck. The rodents were cured.
Up to 15% of women may see their first pregnancy become seriously complicated due to an unexpected attack of hypertension. Up to 30 women die every year in Spain during childbirth. Most of them die from hemorrhages that become uncontrollable and many others, precisely, from preeclampsia, which is a problem unique to the human species.
A “real troublemaker”
The main indicator of this disorder is high blood pressure, although it is not the only one. Gestosis, which is also called that, manifests itself from the 20th week of pregnancy with a drop in protein levels in the urine, pulmonary edema, severe headaches, in the upper part of the stomach… Researchers from at the University of Western Ontario, in Canada, discovered a few years ago that a determining factor in preeclampsia was that protein P-tau, a “real troublemaker,” which appeared present in this disease as well as in various neurological disorders.
In 2021, Xiao Zhen Zhou and his colleague Kun Ping Lu developed an antibody against Alzheimer’s, which they decided to test against preeclampsia. If this P-tau was present in both diseases, they said, perhaps the therapeutic solution they were testing would be valid for both. They found that the protein they analyzed was “a crucial culprit and essential biomarker of preeclampsia. “It can be used for early diagnosis of the complication and is also a crucial therapeutic objective.”
Dementia generator
The antibody they worked with “efficiently depleted the toxic protein in the blood and placenta and corrected all the characteristics associated” with preeclampsia in the model mice used. “Elevated blood pressure, excess protein in the urine, and fetal growth restriction, among others, were eliminated and the pregnancy was normal.”
While research continues to find out the impact of the drug used against Alzheimer’s, researchers consider the link between both diseases to be proven. The risk of dementia, they say, is greater in mothers who have suffered preeclampsia and their children. The discovery, which is published in the specialized media Nature Communications, has opened the doors to the early detection of the disease and its therapeutic approach.
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