2007 Press Releases
€1.7million Grant for Obstetrics and Gynaecological Research Project
The development of an early pregnancy screening test that will detect
the major complications of pregnancy in first time mothers, including
the potentially fatal disease, preeclampsia is the aim of a new
research project starting at Cork University Maternity Hospital (CUMH).
The project has just been awarded a grant of €1.7 million by the Health
Research Board for the project at CUMH - the largest single award ever
made to a single project in Ireland for obstetrics and gynaecological
research.
This funding will enable the CUMH team to join the international SCOPE
(Screening of Pregnancy Endpoints) project which involves the world's
leading obstetricians and scientists in a study of 10,000 women. "Our
group, SCOPE Ireland will be the biggest largest single contributor to
the project biobank with samples from 3,000 women. The SCOPE project is
the single biggest and probably most important initiative on women and
babies on an international level ever and I am thrilled that through
the HRB funding, we are going to be such a big part of it particularly
as research into women and baby's health has traditionally been
chronically underfunded," explains Senior lecturer in Obstetrics and
Gynaecology at UCC and consultant obstetrician/gynaecology at CUMH, Dr
Louise Kenny who is leading SCOPE Ireland.
Identifying a mother's assessment for complications will mean the level
of prenatal care can be matched to each woman's personal risk profile
and preventative therapies offered to those at high risk, explains Dr
Kenny. On the other hand, women who are at low risk could be reassured
and medical intervention in their pregnancy care minimised.
Starting in September, 3,000 women will be recruited over the next
three years to take part in the study which will involve having extra
blood tests and scans during the course of their pregnancy.
Preeclampsia, fetal growth restriction and spontaneous preterm birth
are the major complications of late pregnancy and the leading causes of
illness and death in mothers and new-born babies. In the developed
world, in almost half the cases either the mother and/or baby require
admission to an intensive care unit.
Dr Kenny explains that preeclampsia is a severe high blood pressure
condition where the mother can develop kidney or liver problems, stroke
and seizures which affects 5% of first time mothers. Each year, the
number of maternal deaths from preeclampsia world-wide is equivalent to
the loss of 170 jumbo jets of pregnant women. A quarter of the babies
born to mothers with preeclampsia are growth restricted and a third are
premature.
She says: "Our knowledge of preeclampsia is very limited, we don't even
understand why it happens to certain woman so we don't have very good
ways of treating it. There is no particular drug or cure for it and no
predictive test at the outset of pregnancy. The reality is that if you
develop preeclampsia in pregnancy in 2007, you will not be treated much
differently than if you had it in 1907."
Unfortunately, the only treatment for preeclampsia in pregnancy is
early delivery of the baby through caesarean section, according to Dr
Kenny, as the mother will die if the baby is not taken from the
womb. "In Ireland where we have a developed healthcare system, we
can do Caesarean sections to deliver pre-term babies, but in
sub-Saharan Africa, preeclampsia kills between 50-100,000 women every
year. There are similarities between preeclampsia and the other two
main complications of pregnancy, but we do not have a good
understanding or predictive test for those either."
Dr Kenny will be recruiting specialist midwives and scientists to the
project over the summer and will be taking a break from her own
clinical work to get it up and running for September.
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