Cardiology fellow Anum Minhas and maternal fetal medicine specialist Arthur “Jason” Vaught discuss a study that found women with preeclampsia had higher antibodies against a vascular protein, which may be used as a biomarker to help direct patients to care.
So we know that women with pre clumsy A have anywhere from a to toe four even up to eight times higher mist of having cardiovascular disease later in life. What we don't understand really is why they have this rest. So pretty clumsy is traditionally thought of as high blood pressure, um, protein in the urine during pregnancy that goes away after pregnancy. However, the women that have pre eclampsia continue to have a risk of having hypertension, which is the leading cause of morbidity in the United States. Is doctor bought previously said. So our goal was to investigate biomarkers, particularly angiotensin one type on receptor auto anybody and they're linked towards future development of cardiovascular disease. So we enrolled women during pregnancy, followed them again at four years postpartum and measured levels of this anybody both during pregnancy and a four years postpartum. We found that women that have pre eclampsia have higher levels of the anybody both during pregnancy and still at four years, the levels continue to be higher than women that never had create Colombia. Secondly, more importantly, we found that women that had high levels of this anybody also had abnormal echocardiogram, thick parameters. So that's suggestive of diastolic dysfunction, which is equivalent of heart failure in a clinical setting that happened during pregnancy, and at four years they had new hypertension, so a substantial number had gone on toe. Have new hypertension at four years. Mhm e think what we want to get across is that we have potentially found a biomarker that can be used to detect women that will have future part of that disease. This is important because we will be able to use precision medicine to help find those women and get them plugged in to get the care that they needed. Dr. E. I think you're absolutely correct. This is something that I think is novel and angels, insulin, receptor auto. Anybody has been studied in other disease scenarios, but this is really one of the first times that it's really in putting the implication effective since the disorders of pregnancy, specifically preeclampsia. I think one thing that I'm really most proud about this research is that you know, we talk about the tripartite mission at Hopkins, which is education, research and training. But this is like a true project where it really takes into all of those, um, those three pillars. You know, obviously it's research that were being innovative. We're trying to find something new. Um, educationally were growing. We can teach others. And then there's aspect of training and, you know, Doctor Made house is actually Johns Hopkins. You know, I guess I could say inaugural cardiology, obstetrics fellow, which is also very innovative. And not many people are are doing around the country. So we're being Trailblazers, and she's being a Trailblazer in that, um, something else that I think is so important is that it kind of adds on to an aspect of community and social justice. We know that hypertensive disorders of pregnancy disproportionately affect black and brown women. We also know that hypertensive disease and cardiovascular disease disproportionately affected black and brown people. And so I'm really pleased to be a part of a project where we're trying to be innovative and we're trying to get answers. And we're trying to keep women cardiovascular lee safe not just through the first six weeks postpartum, but throughout the rest of their life and get them integrated into cardiovascular or internal medicine programs that can keep them not only healthy from the cardiovascular lifestyle but also keep them productive. Members of our society keep them being engineers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, um, and also keep them healthy for other exciting aspects of their life. So I really, really think that this project is something that's very special and very interesting for multiple reasons.