Vasopressin, depression, pain & preeclampsia

Aims: Preeclampsia (PreE) is a prevalent hypertensive disorder of pregnancy leading to a death every minute worldwide. Predictive and preventative challenges in PreE stems from its unclear early-pregnancy etiology. Arginine vasopressin (AVP) secretion, as measured by copeptin, activates the stress response system and is a novel, early pregnancy predictor of PreE. In addition, elevated AVP is associated with stress, depression and pain. Our Precision Healthcare goal is to understand how AVP-associated changes in depression and pain affect the phenotype of PreE to develop preventative and therapeutic modalities against it. We hypothesize that in humans, antecedent depression and pain affects early pregnancy AVP secretion/copeptin which will be differentially predictive of PreE. To address this hypothesis we aim to 1) determine the association of maternal plasma copeptin and measures of depression and pain throughout human gestation and 2) determine how depression and pain through gestation affects an early pregnancy copeptin based prediction model of preeclampsia.