MONDAY, Sept. 19 (HealthDay News) -- The risk of pre-eclampsia is higher during a pregnancy if the baby's father was born after a pre-eclamptic pregnancy himself, according to a report in the British Medical Journal. The study suggests that both a father and mother may pass on pre-eclampsia-related genes to their offspring.
Rolv Skjærven, Ph.D., of the University of Bergen, Norway, and colleagues conducted a cohort study of Norwegian medical birth registry data including 438,597 mother-child and 286,945 father-child data sets. Primary outcome was pre-eclampsia in the second generation of persons born of a pre-eclamptic pregnancy, and secondary outcomes included pre-eclamptic pregnancies of siblings who themselves were born normally. Pre-eclampsia was defined as an increase in blood pressure to ≥140/90 mm Hg after the 20th week of gestation.
Daughters of women who had had a pre-eclamptic pregnancy were 2.2 times more likely than other women to have an affected pregnancy, the authors report. Men who were born after a pre-eclamptic pregnancy were 1.5 times more likely than their peers to have fathered a pre-eclamptic pregnancy.
In addition, sisters of affected women or men who were born without incident, had an increased likelihood of having a pre-eclamptic pregnancy. However, no correlation was noted in brothers of affected persons.
The authors conclude that both maternal and paternal factors can contribute to pre-eclampsia, but the risk imposed by the mother is higher because they include both transmitted and maternal factors.
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