LONDON -- Women at high risk for toxemia, one of the most dangerous complications of pregnancy, might avoid the condition by taking vitamin C and E pills, new research suggests.
But the British scientists who conducted the study -- the first to investigate the vitamins' potential to prevent the condition also known as pre-eclampsia -- warned that pregnant women should not rush to start taking large doses of the vitamins, since the findings are preliminary.Researchers haven't even yet determined if the high doses are safe for the developing fetus.
The benefit suggested by the study must be confirmed in large-scale experiments, said lead researcher Lucilla Poston, a professor who runs the fetal health research group at Guy's, King's and St. Thomas' School of Medicine in London.
Toxemia, which occurs in about 5 percent of pregnancies, is a potentially fatal condition in which blood vessels throughout the body and womb constrict, reducing the amount of the mother's blood that reaches the fetus.
It develops late in pregnancy and produces a sudden rise in blood pressure and swelling. If untreated, it can progress to convulsions, bleeding in the mother's brain, liver or kidney, and force early delivery to save the mother and child.
Women at higher risk include older or very young mothers, those in their first pregnancy, those carrying twins and women who are overweight or have diabetes, high blood-pressure or blood-clotting disorders.
Scientists believe toxemia of pregnancy could be connected to the damage oxygen does to the blood vessels and to impaired activity of antioxidants, substances that fight the attacks of oxygen.
Poston's study of 160 pregnant women at high risk for the condition, published in this week's issue of The Lancet, a British medical journal, found that taking 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C and 400 International Units -- the measure that some vitamin supplements are quoted in -- of vitamin E daily cut the chances of toxemia by 76 percent.