Increased Risk of Preeclampsia in Women With a Genetic Predisposition to Elevated Blood Pressure

Preeclampsia causes significant maternal and perinatal morbidity. Genetic factors seem to affect the onset of the disease. We aimed to investigate whether the polygenic risk score for blood pressure (BP; BP-PRS) is associated with preeclampsia, its subtypes, and BP values during pregnancy. The analyses were performed in the FINNPEC study (Finnish Genetics of Pre-Eclampsia Consortium) cohort of 1514 preeclamptic and 983 control women. In a case-control setting, the data were divided into percentiles to compare women with high BP-PRS (HBP-PRS; >95th percentile) or low BP-PRS (≤5th percentile) to others. Furthermore, to evaluate the effect of BP-PRS on BP, we studied 3 cohorts: women with preeclampsia, hypertensive controls, and normotensive controls. BP values were higher in women with HBP-PRS throughout the pregnancy. Preeclampsia was more common in women with HBP-PRS compared with others (71.8% and 60.1%, respectively; =0.009), and women with low BP-PRS presented with preeclampsia less frequently than others (44.8% and 61.5%, respectively;