Pre-Eclampsia

May 9th, 2009 by jenny - Tagged with - Posted in Blog

I went to an APEC (Action on Pre-Eclampsia) study day yesterday at Kings College, London which was extremely informative.  Professor Chris Redman who is a world renowned authority on the subject gave a brilliant lecture.  Pre-Eclampsia is an illness arising only in pregnancy which can affect the mother, her unborn child or most commonly both. It can occur at any time from around twenty weeks to as late as several days after delivery.  In the mother, the condition causes a number of symptomless disturbances - including raised blood pressure (hypertension) and leakage of protein in the urine (proteinuria) - which can progress to serious illness if undetected.  The unborn baby may grow more slowly than normal or suffer potentially dangerous oxygen deficiency.  There are other symptoms, i.e. bad headaches that don’t go away, blurred vision, bad pain just below the ribs, especially on the right side and puffiness usually in the face.   The main thing that I brought home with me from the study day was that not all of these symptoms are there for the majority of the women and sometimes it is just one of them that has been noticed and followed through for PET (pre-elampsia) to be picked up.  APEC is a charity whose aim is to give advice, information and help for mothers, families of those who have been affected and midwives.  They have many leaflets  and information packs available, particularly for mothers who have experienced PET in a previous pregnancy and are wanting advice before having another child and also a helpline number.   There are also Precog (Pre-Eclampsia community guidelines) which can be downloaded for midwives.  www.apec.org.uk