Breakthrough could help 1 in 12 mums-to-be

A DEADLY pregnancy complication affecting 50,000 women a year is caused by their immune system rejecting the baby, research shows.

Pre- eclampsia starts when a mother’s white blood cells fail to adapt to the foreign body – the baby – inside her, scientists have found.

The breakthrough could prevent a complication that affects up to one in 12 pregnancies in the UK and starves the baby of nutrients and oxygen in the womb.

Women could be given extra pregnancy hormones to change the behaviour of the white blood cells. This could prevent the damage to blood vessels within the placenta, which risks the lives of very small babies cut off from their mothers’ food supply.

Instead, the white blood cells, called neutrophils, could be harnessed to help these blood vessels grow properly.

Dr Suchita Nadkarni, author of the study led by Queen Mary University of London, said: ‘Scientists have always thought of neutrophils as being the bad guys, as they release a lot of pro-inflammatory proteins which make pre-eclampsia worse.

‘But I hope this work will help us understand better how the immune system is involved in pre-eclampsia and why. The neutrophils could help us develop a new therapy.’

Both mothers and their babies can die from pre-eclampsia. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the hormones oestrioland progesterone made the immune system work normally.

When neutrophils were given hormone treatment and then implanted in mice, the development of their placenta began to return to normal.