Sunday, May 10, 2009

High Blood Pressure in pregnancy could be linked to a virus infection

Health - For baby and mother
Pre-eclampsia, the high blood pressure in pregnancy that can endanger both mother and baby, may be associated with a virus infection of the fetus, an Australian study has found. Researchers compared 609 normal pregnancies with 717 that had one or more of four adverse outcomes; premature birth, small for gestational age, bleeding during pregnancy or preeclampsia.

The scientists tested each baby’s blood within five days of birth for the DNA or RNA of eight different viruses. Virus exposure was associated with all four negative outcomes, but especially highly with pre-eclampsia. Mothers of babies who tested positive for any virus were more than five times as likely to have had preeclampsia, and those whose babies tested positive for a herpes virus were almost six times as likely.

The study appears in the March issue of the British journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.The authors acknowledged that their cases and controls were not matched and that the small number of cases of preeclampsia in their sample (23) made it difficult to draw firm conclusions.

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