Evaluation of Vascular Endothelial Function in Young and Middle-Aged Women with Respect to a History of Pregnancy, Pregnancy-Related Complications, Classical Cardiovascular Risk Factors, and Epigenetics

Abstract

The aim of the study was to examine the effect of previous pregnancies and classical cardiovascular risk factors on vascular endothelial function in a group of 264 young and middle-aged women 3 to 11 years postpartum. We examined microvascular functions by peripheral arterial tonometry and EndoPAT 2000 device with respect to a history of gestational hypertension, preeclampsia, fetal growth restriction, the severity of the disease with regard to the degree of clinical signs and delivery date. Besides, we compared Reactive Hyperemia Index (RHI) values and the prevalence of vascular endothelial dysfunction among the groups of women with normal and abnormal values of BMI, waist circumference, systolic and diastolic blood pressures, heart rate, total serum cholesterol levels, serum high-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels, serum low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels, serum triglycerides levels, serum lipoprotein A levels, serum C-reactive protein levels, serum uric acid levels, and plasma homocysteine levels. Furthermore, we determined the effect of total number of pregnancies and total parity per woman, infertility and blood pressure treatment, presence of trombophilic gene mutations, current smoking of cigarettes, and current hormonal contraceptive use on the vascular endothelial function. We also examined the association between the vascular endothelial function and postpartum whole peripheral blood expression of microRNAs involved in pathogenesis of cardiovascular/cerebrovascular diseases (miR-1-3p, miR-16-5p, miR-17-5p, miR-20a-5p, miR-20b-5p, miR-21-5p, miR-23a-3p, miR-24-3p, miR-26a-5p, miR-29a-3p, miR-92a-3p, miR-100-5p, miR-103a-3p, miR-125b-5p, miR-126-3p, miR-130b-3p, miR-133a-3p, miR-143-3p, miR-145-5p, miR-146a-5p, miR-155-5p, miR-181a-5p, miR-195-5p, miR-199a-5p, miR-210-3p, miR-221-3p, miR-342-3p, miR-499a-5p, and miR-574-3p). A proportion of overweight women (17.94% and 20.59%) and women with central obesity (18.64% and 21.19%) had significantly lower RHI values at 10.0% false positive rate (FPR) both before and after adjustment of the data for the age of patients. At 10.0% FPR, a proportion of women with vascular endothelial dysfunction (RHI ≤ 1.67) was identified to have up-regulated expression profile of miR-1-3p (11.76%), miR-23a-3p (17.65%), and miR-499a-5p (18.82%) in whole peripheral blood. RHI values also negatively correlated with expression of miR-1-3p, miR-23a-3p, and miR-499a-5p in whole peripheral blood. Otherwise, no significant impact of other studied factors on vascular endothelial function was found. We suppose that screening of these particular microRNAs associated with vascular endothelial dysfunction may help to stratify a highly risky group of young and middle-aged women that would benefit from early implementation of primary prevention strategies. Nevertheless, it is obvious, that vascular endothelial dysfunction is just one out of multiple cardiovascular risk factors which has only a partial impact on abnormal expression of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease associated microRNAs in whole peripheral blood of young and middle-aged women.

The Influence of Various Smoking Categories on The Risk of Gestational Hypertension and Pre-Eclampsia

“…In the pathomechanism of PE, the primary role of trophoblast invasion disorders in the period of placenta development and placental ischemia has been demonstrated. In addition, increased oxidative stress and inflammation as well as endothelial damage are main elements of the disease pathogenesis [2,[5][6][7]28]. Importantly, different components of tobacco smoke may act on different processes or they may act differently on the same cellular processes, which may cause discrepancies between tests.…”

Substantially Altered Expression Profile of Diabetes/Cardiovascular/Cerebrovascular Disease Associated microRNAs in Children Descending from Pregnancy Complicated by Gestational Diabetes Mellitus—One of Several Possible Reasons for an Increased Cardiovascular Risk

“…Previously, by searching the Medline database we identified a large scale of microRNAs playing a role in pathogenesis of diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular/cerebrovascular diseases. Finally, we selected for the study a shortlist of 29 microRNAs demonstrated repetitively by numerous scientific teams to be associated with normal stages (development and homeostasis of the cardiovascular system, angiogenesis, and adipogenesis) and pathological conditions and diseases (vascular endothelial dysfunction and inflammation, hypoxia, hypertension and regulation of hypertension-related genes, obesity, dyslipidaemia, atherosclerosis and atherosclerotic plaque formation, insulin resistance, diabetes mellitus and diabetes-related complications, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular diseases involving the blood vessels (coronary and peripheral artery diseases, carotid artery disease, pulmonary arterial hypertension, cerebrovascular disease, aortic and intracranial aneurysms), cardiovascular diseases involving the heart (congenital heart disease, cardiomyopathies, cardiac dysrhythmias, hypertensive heart disease, myocardial disease, valvular heart disease, inflammatory heart disease, rheumatic heart disease, pulmonary heart disease, and heart failure), chronic kidney disease, ischemia/reperfusion injury, cardiac regeneration and cachexia) ( Table 1 ) [ 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 ,…”

High-Throughput Metabolomics Discovers Metabolic Biomarkers and Pathways to Evaluating the Efficacy and Exploring Potential Mechanisms of Osthole Against Osteoporosis Based on UPLC/Q-TOF-MS Coupled With Multivariate Data Analysis

“…Women with all ages resulting from physiological structure of bone as well as gradually reducing levels of estrogen and progesterone, which is related with higher rate of bone resorption in osteoclasts are approximately five times possibility to suffer from osteoporosis than men ( Srivastava and Deal, 2002 ; Adler, 2014 ). It was reported that about 200 million women aged between 45 and 55 years are affected by postmenopausal osteoporosis ( Hromadnikova et al, 2020 ). Bone mineral density (BMD) as an essential indicator in clinical practice to appraise osteoporosis is not sensitive to the patients with severe ostealgia and humpback leading to the morbidity rate continues to increase including young adults ( Ha et al, 2020 ; Guo et al, 2020 ).…”