Nicoletta Lanese is the health channel editor at Live Science and was previously a news editor and staff writer at the site. She holds a graduate certificate in science communication from UC Santa Cruz and degrees in neuroscience and dance from the University of Florida. Her work has appeared in The Scientist, Science News, the Mercury News, Mongabay and Stanford Medicine Magazine, among other outlets. Based in NYC, she also remains heavily involved in dance and performs in local choreographers' work.
A blood test given as early as the end of the first trimester of pregnancy could help identify patients at the highest risk of preeclampsia, a potentially life-threatening condition associated with high blood pressure in pregnancy, before it occurs.
However, some of these screening tests are tricky to administer or aren't routinely given in early pregnancy, said Bernard Thienpont, head of the Laboratory for Functional Epigenetics at KU Leuven in Belgium and senior author of new research describing the blood test. This free-floating DNA comes from dying cells in the body, and if you're pregnant, a fraction comes from the placenta, which is why it's useful for prenatal screening, Thienpont explained. This could also make the DNA useful for preeclampsia screening, Thienpont's team thought, given evidence that the condition may stem from problems with the placenta.
They analyzed this cell-free DNA previously collected from nearly 500 pregnant women and then stored. About one-third of the women included in the study had developed early-onset preeclampsia, which develops before week 34 of pregnancy. Both at the time of their diagnosis and weeks earlier, preeclamptic women had different patterns of DNA methylation than the control group, and these differences were linked to cell-free DNA from the placenta, rather than from other cell types.
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