article · Heliyon
Pre-eclampsia is a serious metabolic condition impacting mothers and their infants during pregnancy. This hospital-based case-control investigation evaluated whether maternal serum concentrations of uric acid, blood urea, and creatinine can serve as predictive diagnostic markers for the condition. Blood samples from pregnant women were analysed using an automated chemistry analyser to compare pre-eclamptic participants with normotensive controls. The findings showed that pre-eclamptic women had significantly higher average levels of serum uric acid and blood urea compared to controls, whilst creatinine levels showed a non-significant increase. Diagnostic accuracy evaluation demonstrated moderate predictive performance across all three biomarkers, with serum uric acid showing the highest area under the curve. Although these biochemical measures show potential utility for identifying pre-eclampsia, further multi-centre prospective research is necessary before they can be integrated into routine clinical testing.
Pre-eclampsia poses severe health risks to both pregnant women and developing infants, yet effective diagnostic tools remain limited. Identifying reliable, accessible blood markers such as uric acid and urea provides healthcare providers with potential indicators to detect pre-eclampsia. Clarifying their diagnostic accuracy helps clinicians understand the baseline capability of standard laboratory tests in identifying women at risk of this condition.
This research informs the development of routine laboratory diagnostic protocols for detecting pre-eclampsia using standard automated chemistry analysers. The immediate potential users are clinical laboratories, obstetricians, and healthcare diagnostic services. However, this is early-stage research: the findings require validation through large-scale, multi-centre prospective clinical trials before these cut-off values can be adopted into standardised commercial diagnostic tests or clinical guidelines.
AI-generated from the published abstract. Always read the original work before citing.
Background: Pre-eclampsia (PE) is a metabolic disorder that adversely affects the lives of mother and their infants. Even though, several studies have been conducted on PE, no effective diagnostic and therapeutic agents were developed so far. Hence, this study was designed to evaluate serum uric acid, blood urea and creatinine levels in the prediction of PE. Methods: A hospital-based case-control study was conducted among pregnant women. A simple random sampling technique was applied to select study participants. The socio-demographic and clinical data were collected using an interview-administered questionnaire. Serum samples were used to determine the maternal uric acid, urea and creatinine levels via an automated chemistry analyzer. Independent sample t-test, Pearson correlation test and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis were performed to check the association and diagnostic accuracy of variables to PE. Results: The mean ages (in years) of the case and control groups were 27.98 ± 5.64 and 27.33 ± 4.45, respectively. The mean serum uric acid and blood urea levels were significantly higher in pre-eclamptic women than in normotensive pregnant women (6.27 ± 0.20 vs 4.43 ± 0.15, and 8.50 ± 3.99 vs 5.67 ± 2.19), respectively but the serum creatinine level is non-significantly increased in cases as compared to controls (0.70 ± 0.05 vs 0.50 ± 0.01). The areas under the ROC curve of serum uric acid, creatinine and blood urea levels were 0.785, 0.735 and 0.764 (sensitivity: 69%, 60.7%, 67.9%; specificity: 73.8%, 75%, 71.4%) with the cutoff points of ≥5.25 mg/dL, ≥0.565 mg/dL and ≥6.5 mg/dL, respectively. Conclusion: In this study, we observed a significantly higher concentration of serum uric acid and blood urea values in pre-eclampsia as compared with normotensive pregnant women. Therefore, this suggested that serum uric acid; blood urea and creatinine values can be associated with PE. Moreover, serum uric acid, blood urea and creatinine levels could be carefully utilized as a diagnostic marker for PE, but their inclusion in routine diagnostic test to PE requires large-scale multi-center prospective studies that corroborate our findings.
This page summarises published work. The authoritative version sits with the publisher.
DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e11098
Is something wrong with this record? Report it or request removal.
Discussion
Have you built on this work, tried to replicate it, or seen it applied in practice? Share what you know. Verified researchers and MARATTO™ domain experts can open a discussion, and any member can reply. Contributions are reviewed before they appear.
No discussion yet. Open the first thread.
New to MARATTO™? Create a free account.
