Impact of preeclampsia on cognitive function in the offspring

Preeclampsia (PE) is a significant clinical disorder occurring in 3-5% of all human pregnancies. Offspring of PE pregnancies (PE-F1s) are reported to exhibit greater cognitive impairment than offspring from uncomplicated pregnancies. Previous studies of PE-F1 cognitive ability used tests with bias that do not assess specific cognitive domains. To improve cognitive impairment classification in PE-F1s we used standardized clinical psychometric testing and eye tracking studies of saccadic eye movements. PE-F1s (n = 10) and sex/age matched control participants (n = 41 for psychometrics; n = 59 for eye-tracking) were recruited from the PE-NET study or extracted from the NeuroDevNet study databases. Participants completed a selected array of psychometric tests which assessed executive function, working memory, attention, inhibition, visuospatial processing, reading, and math skills. Eye-tracking studies included the prosaccade, antisaccade, and memory-guided tasks. Psychometric testing revealed an impairment in working memory among PE-F1s. Eye-tracking studies revealed numerous impairments among PE-F1s including additional saccades required to reach the target, poor endpoint accuracy, and slower reaction time. However, PE-F1s made faster saccades than controls, and fewer sequence errors in the memory-guided task. Our study provides a comprehensive assessment of cognitive function among PE-F1s. The development of PE may be seen as an early predictor of reduced cognitive function in children, specifically in working memory and oculomotor control. Future studies should extended to a larger study populations, and may be valuable for early studies of children born to pregnancies complicated by other disorders, such as gestational diabetes or intrauterine growth restriction. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.