A new treatment may be coming for a condition called preeclampsia, which is a serious complication of pregnancy. Preeclampsia is a type of high blood pressure that occurs late in pregnancy and is responsible for up to 20% of premature births.
A study published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology reports on the effectiveness of a treatment that removes a protein from the blood of a pregnant woman with severe preeclampsia. The mother's blood is passed through a machine that filters out the protein, which is called soluble Fms-Like Tyrosine Kinase-1 (sFlt-1).
This research is in the early stages and was only tested on 11 pregnant women, but the results showed that the treatment extended the pregnancy by an average of 8 extra days if they underwent the treatment once. If the treatment was done more than once, it extended the pregnancy 15 days. The women were 23 to 32 weeks pregnant. Even extending a pregnancy by several days improves the chances that a premature baby will survive and will avoid health complications due to being born early.
The treatment, called apheresis, reduces the amount of sFlt-1 protein in the blood and also temporarily lowers the mother's blood pressure.
Until now, the only treatment for preeclampsia was to deliver the baby early, since the high blood pressure and high blood proteins levels endanger both the mother and child. If it is left untreated, preeclampsia causes premature labor and birth.
The study was conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Larger randomized studies will have to be conducted to see whether this treatment will help prevent births or delay t.
An editorial in the same issue of the journal noted: "Achieving an additional week of gestational age in a premature infant at the gestational ages studied is important and, given the cost of care in the neonatal intensive care unit, probably cost-effective."
"Based on recent advances in the understanding of this condition, we and others are developing treatments for preeclampsia to allow women to safely prolong their pregnancy if they are suffering from very preterm preeclampsia."