October 8, 1999

A research team from the MGH and BWH has found that elevated cholesterol levels appear to be a risk factor for preeclampsia, a condition of pregnancy that can have dangerous consequences for both the mother and child. The report, which appears in the October issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology, analyzed data from the Nurses' Health Study II, based at the Harvard School of Public Health and BWH.

In preeclampsia, or toxemia, a pregnant woman develops high blood pressure and other metabolic abnormalities. If not appropriately managed, preeclampsia can proceed to eclampsia – characterized by seizures – or liver or kidney failure. Any of these complications can prove fatal to the mother. There also is an increased risk of premature delivery, which places numerous risks on the baby.

The research team compared information about three groups of women participating in the Nurses' Health Study II: 15,000 women who reported pregnancy without any hypertension-related disorder, 86 who had confirmed preeclampsia and 216 with a less serious condition called gestational hypertension. They found that twice as many women who had preeclampsia reported having elevated cholesterol levels before pregnancy, compared with only 11 percent of those in the other two groups.

"This may prove to be one of the few controllable risk factors for preeclampsia, a disorder for which we have no treatment and one that affects thousands of women every year," says the study's first author Ravi Thadhani, MD, MPH, of the MGH Renal Unit and the Channing Laboratory at BWH. "We need to learn more about exactly which lipids are involved in this observation, but it's a first step toward developing effective prevention techniques."

The report's co-authors are Meir Stampfer, MD, DrPH; David Hunter, MBBS, ScD; Joann Manson, MD, DrPH; Caren Soloman, MD, MPH, of the division of Preventive Medicine at BWH; and the study's senior author, Gary Curhan, MD, ScD, of the MGH Renal Unit and BWH.