Adequate maternal, intervillous and fetal blood flow are all necessary for fetal wellbeing.
Compromise to any part of this exchange would be detrimental to pregnancy outcome. Preeclampsia
is associated with reduced maternal spiral artery flow, resulting in reduced placental
perfusion. This in turn creates an ischemic environment which may pre-dispose morphological
changes in placental villi. This pilot study utilized morphometric image analysis to examine
some features of the fetal component of the placenta in normotensive (NT) and pre-eclamptic
(PE) groups. The features examined included: density of placental villi (expressed as
percentage of field area occupied by placental tissue); stem vessel carrying capacity
(expressed as percentage of stem villus area occupied by vessel lumina); the thickness of the
stem arterial walls relative to artery size (expressed as percentage of artery area occupied by
arterial wall) and the extent of fibrosis associated with villi (expressed as percentage of field
area occupied by fibrosis). The results were as follows: density of placental villus arrangement
NT:51.89±6.19, PE:64.78±6.93 (P<0.001); carrying capacity of stem villi NT:17.20±11.78,
PE:8.67±8.51 (P<0.001); relative thickness of stem villi arterial walls NT:74.08±12.92, PE:
86.85±10.55 (P<0.001); and extent of fibrosis NT:0.727±0.310, PE:1.582±0.707 (P<0.001).
These significant differences between normotensive and pre-eclamptic placentae suggest
possible fetal maladaptations in response to the intervillous ischemia, compounding the
existing maternal compromise to materno-fetal exchange. / Thesis (M.Med.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ukzn/oai:http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za:10413/9628 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Ducray, Jennifer Frances. |
| Contributors | Naicker, Thajasvarie. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en_ZA |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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