**Author details**

*Prediction of Maternal and Fetal Syndrome of Preeclampsia*

tensive or proteinuric disorders in pregnancy [73].

compared to normal pregnancies [74, 75].

significant end-organ dysfunction.

tional diabetes, chronic hypertension, and autoimmune disease. **C.** The pathologic changes are present long before clinical manifestations.

tistics, researchers, and clinicians.

the severity of the disease.

p-selectin, and VEGF receptor mRNA values were higher in preeclampsia, whereas human placental lactogen, KISS-1, and plasminogen activator type 1 were lower, both compared to normotensive controls [68]. Similar results were reported from some other studies also [69, 70], where circulating cells of fetal/ placental origin were a source of mRNA. mRNAs were increased in women with preeclampsia, and there was a direct correlation between expression levels and

Protein, a functional product of gene expression can be measured. A set of differently expressed proteins which are involved in lipid metabolism, coagulation, complement regulation, extracellular matrix remodeling, protease inhibitor activity, and acute phase responses can be measured. A different pattern of proteins between the group of women who subsequently developed preeclampsia on one side and without preeclampsia on the other side [71] was reported. It is also reported that women with severe preeclampsia have a unique urine proteomic pattern [72] and that this proteomic profile appeared more than 10 weeks before the clinical manifestations, and this distinguished preeclampsia from other hyper-

Some studies revealed that metabolomic strategies might be appropriate for investigating the metabolic function of trophoblast or placental tissue, and it was found that preeclamptic pregnancies have a different metabolomic profile when

These novel technologies in preeclampsia appear quite promising. The number of studies is growing, and the results suggest that the use of transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic profiles may be predictive for preeclampsia. These techniques open new possibilities to find a new set of biomarkers for preeclampsia. Future studies are needed, with the collaborative efforts of bioinformatics, biosta-

**A.** Preeclampsia is a pregnancy-specific hypertensive disorder with or without proteinuria that occurs after 20 weeks of gestation in a previously normotensive woman. In the absence of proteinuria, the diagnosis can still be made if new-onset hypertension is accompanied by signs or symptoms of

**B.** Major risk factors for development of preeclampsia include past history of preeclampsia, pregesta-

**D.** Endothelial dysfunction and disturbed angiogenic balance are one of the key features of the

**E.** Preeclampsia serum levels of VEGF, PLGF, PP13, and inhibin A are decreased, and sFlt-1 and sEng

Many studies demonstrate the importance of optimal management of blood pressure in pregnancy hypertension. The use of angiogenic biomarkers gives us promising results for the prediction and diagnosis of preeclampsia, but there is still a lack of specific and reliable biomarkers to predict preeclampsia, particularly in the first trimester of pregnancy. New methods to isolate and characterize markers outside the protein field (lipids, nucleic acids, etc.) from serum/plasma/urine/

**68**

**8. Conclusions**

disease.

are increased.

Key points

saliva are useful.

Osredkar Joško1,2\* and Kumer Kristina1

1 University Medical Centre Ljubljana, Clinical Institute of Clinical Chemistry and Biochemistry, Ljubljana, Slovenia

2 Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

\*Address all correspondence to: josko.osredkar@kclj.si

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
