Control of vascular reactivity in pregnancy induced hypertension

To evaluate the possibility that vascular reactivity in umbilical artery is different in normal and pre-eclamptic condition, we assessed an "in vitro study" on strips of umbilical arteries removed at the end of normal and pre-eclamptic pregnancy. We studied the reactivity of those arteries to prostaglandin A1 and prostaglandin F2α-The dose-response analysis to prostaglandins on normal umbilical arteries were between 10-7 and 10-4; in contrast, the results obtained on arteries removed at the end of pre-eclamptic pregnancies were not consistent. In this group a tendency to two different distributions seemed to occur and was related to different clinical features of pre-eclampsia, namely the early and the late onset of the disease. Our results suggest that the various clinical pictures of pre-eclampsia correlate with different conditions of vascular reactivity.