New blood test to predict preeclampsia earlier in pregnant woman

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a blood test that can help predict preeclampsia, a serious hypertensive disorder that affects roughly 2 per cent to 8 per cent of pregnant women worldwide. Typically, to check preeclampsia risk, doctors measure blood pressure and proteins in urine, but as pregnancy progresses these tests are poor predictors and raise the risk of disability and death among childbearing women. The new test works by detecting sFlt1 and PIGF — two proteins in the blood that predict poor outcomes from preeclampsia with substantially better accuracy than the current methods. The test can be used between 23 and 35 weeks of pregnancy to predict development of severe preeclampsia among women who have symptoms of, or have been diagnosed with, hypertension during pregnancy. “Doctors can use this in conjunction with other clinically available tests to stratify their patients to determine whether they’re at high risk for severe preeclampsia and complications, or at low risk, to be managed appropriately,” said Sarosh Rana, the chief of maternal-foetal medicine at the University of Chicago Medicine and a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology