Grant: CIHR Fellowship

More women are having their first pregnancies at an older age. In Canada, 8% of women have their first child when they are over 35 years of age (also known as advanced maternal age). A woman's blood vessels need to go through large changes during pregnancy, so that the fetus can receive enough blood and nutrients to grow normally. If the blood vessels do not adapt well enough, this can cause problems during pregnancy such as poor fetal growth and preeclampsia. Advanced maternal age is a risk factor for both of these pregnancy problems. Unfortunately, advanced maternal age impacts on how well these blood vessels change in pregnant women. If we can find out exactly how advanced maternal age adversely affects these blood vessel changes in pregnancies in women at advanced maternal age, we can target these mechanisms for treatment. Our lab found that uterine arteries from aged pregnant rats did not function as well as the arteries from young pregnant rats. The differences that we found may explain the increased problems in advanced maternal age pregnancies. We thus need to know more about these poor functioning arteries and why they do not function well. To do this, we will assess the function of vessels from pregnant young (4 months old) and aged (9.5 months old, equivalent to ~35 years in humans) rats. We will test blood vessel function, and use specific drugs to identify how their function is different. We will also compare blood vessels from pregnant and non-pregnant young and old rats. This will allow us to test if the blood vessels from old rats adapt differently than in young rats. At the same time, we will assess this mechanism in vessels from human biopsies taken during caesarean deliveries from young and older pregnant women. Pregnancy affects the short- and long-term cardiovascular health of both mother and child. This will help develop new treatments for older pregnant women to improve pregnancy outcomes in this high-risk group.