What Are The Causes of Preeclampsia?

Preeclampsia is a medical condition in which a pregnant woman, who has previously had normal blood pressure, develops hypertension (high blood pressure) and has significantly high amount of protein in her urine. If this condition is not treated, it could lead to serious and even fatal complications for both the mother and the baby.

When one has preeclampsia, the only cure is delivery of baby. However, if this woman were diagnosed with the condition too early in the pregnancy, she and her doctor would face a dilemma. The baby needs more time to mature but the mother needs to have delivery to avoid serious complications to her and her baby.

Even if the mother and the baby survive, the mother could later have a higher risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Meanwhile, the baby is often born prematurely and can suffer complications later in life.

Researchers from Britain's Cambridge and Nottingham Universities announced that they have discovered a mechanism that raises blood pressure in preeclampsia and argued that their work might help the search for new drugs for hypertension. They also believed that they had deciphered the first step in the main process that controls blood pressure: release of a hormone known as angiotensin, from its source protein, angiotensinogen. Their findings were published in the journal ‘Nature’ in October 2010.

Drugs currently used to treat high blood pressure include ACE inhibitors that block the production of angiotensin or angiotensin receptor blockers (ARB), which prevents angiotensin from taking effect in the body once it is released. These drugs work well for standard hypertension but the pregnant women could not take these drugs because they are potentially dangerous to the developing baby.

The study, primarily focused on preeclampsia, also opened new leads for future research into the causes of hypertension in general. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), hypertension itself is the biggest risk factor for causes of death worldwide. Hypertension is also a risk factor for heart disease.

The cost of treating pregnant women with preeclampsia is estimated to be $45 billion a year in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. An estimated 75,000 women in developing countries die of it each year.

Is Chocolate Good Or Bad for Your Heart?

Chocolate is one that many of us have difficulty to refuse. Many scientists have studied the possible impacts of the consumption of chocolate on our bodies including heart and arteries. As you might expect, some of these findings might be positive while others were just negative.

For instance, a paper published in the British medical journal Lancet in 2007 pointed out that any health claims about dark chocolate might not be justified. Instead, many of these chocolate products are harmful to the heart and arteries as they are actually abundant in fat and sugar.

Plain chocolate is rich in flavanols or plant chemicals that are thought to protect the heart and lower blood pressure. However, because of its bitter taste, most manufacturers usually remove flavanols during their making of chocolate products. Therefore, even the co-called dark chocolate products can have no flavanols.

On the other hand, researchers from the Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric & Environmental Epidemiology, at Yale University reported on April 28, 2008 in the May 2008 issue of Epidemiology that daily consumption of a quality dark chocolate is healthy for pregnant women and protects them from getting into hypertension (high blood pressure).

The study involved 2,291 women and spanned over a period of 4 years (1996 to 2000). The density of theobromine (a chemical in chocolate) in the arterial cord blood extracted from the umbilical cord at delivery was measured. The results shown that there was a 69 percent less chance of developing preeclampsia if pregnant women ate rich, dark chocolate.

Preeclampsia, affecting up to 8 percent of pregnancies, is a major pregnancy complication with cardiovascular manifestations such as hypertension.

The theobromine concentrations in chocolate can vary from 0.15 percent to 0.46 percent. According to the researchers, the darker the chocolate is, the better it is. Those highly processed chocolate can be rich in fat and sugar and low in the amount of theobromine.

Besides theobromine, chocolate also contains other chemicals including magnesium, which lowers hypertension, and flavanoids, which are potent antioxidants.

If you like chocolate very much and at the same time want your heart to be healthy, you should only put those dark and bitter chocolates (less fat and sugar) in your future buying list.