Association of Deficiency of Maternal Vitamin D Levels with Severity of Preeclampsia

Abstract

Introduction: Preeclampsia remains to be an important cause of maternal morbidity and mortality in both the developing and developed world. It is imperative to devise preventive strategies to reduce the burden of this disease. Vitamin D deficiency has emerged as an important inflammatory mediator in its pathogenesis. Objective: To find an association between the severity of preeclampsia and vitamin D deficiency amongst women attending a tertiary hospital in northern India. Material & Methods: this was a prospective comparative observational study. 125 women of preeclampsia and 125 controls were enrolled in the study after due written consent. The women of preelampsia were further divided into preeclampsia with or without severe features. After history, examination and relevant routine investigations, both groups underwent testing for vitamin D. Statistical analysis was conducted with the statistical package for the social science software version SPSS 20.0. The comparison of normally distributed continuous variables between the two groups was performed using Student’s t test and for more than two groups comparison done through ANOVA test. For all statistical tests, a p value less than 0.05 was taken to indicate a significant difference/ association. Result: 80% subjects of study group were significantly more vitamin D deficient as compared to 68% of controls (p-value=0.03). Patients with preeclampsia with severe features had significantly lower levels of Vitamin D as compared to controls indicating that increased vitamin D deficiency was associated with increased severity of preeclampsia. None of the cases with severe preeclampsia had normal levels of Vitamin D. This was statistically significant (p-value=0.046). Conclusion: Severe pre-eclampsia was significantly associated with Vit D deficiency. Prevention of Vitamin D deficiency could be beneficial to prevent pre-eclampsia but community intervention studies are required.