Pankaj Desai's Blogs

  Out of the blue flashed a tweet on the social medium Tweeter one day: “My dialysis is becoming very draining for me financially.   Oh, how I wish I die”. It stopped at that. One Obgyn doctor read it. She sensed the pain and helplessness of the person who had tweeted. The reader knew nothing about who had put out this stress call. For inexplicable reasons something made her send an immediate personal message “Can I have your mobile number, please”. The person who had tweeted this was a lady in the fourth decade of her life. She was from a town in MP and was diagnosed as a young primary hypertensive for many years. Then this tragedy struck. Theirs was a comfortably resourced family who was buying all treatment for hypertension with ease. But as they say when tragedy strikes, it strikes enmass. Her father a successful businessman faced a massive loss in business. Out of despair he committed a suicide. The shock took away the mother in less than a year. This left her behind ...

  Not being high-risk does not necessarily mean one is low-risk. It is well known that amongst many parameters to identify potential subjects for developing preeclampsia, nearly all are for identifying high-risk subjects. However there is hardly any research work published that can guide us to low-risk subjects. These are the days of not stopping at identifying high-risk but actually identifying low-risk subjects of preeclampsia. Why do we need to identify the low-risk subjects also? It has been found in clinical practice long since that not being high-risk does not necessarily mean one is low-risk. There are majority of subjects who are not high-risk but are also not necessarily low-risk. As a result we all are over using prophylactic measures. Also we are scared to stop prophylaxis once a subject is labelled high-risk and is never tested again. While pregnancy is a dynamic state, it surely happens that some subjects who may be high risk initially may cease to be so as pregnan...

  Becoming More Scientific, More Rational and More Accurate In Preeclampsia   Abstract Currently the etiopathological changes in preeclampsia are believed to begin at the fetomaternal interface and so the placenta is labeled as the main cause of these conditions. A group from George's University of London and some from other parts of the world have proposed that in mothers with an already compromised cardiovascular function, before the commencement of pregnancy, pregnancy adds to a heavy load resulting in a series of adverse manifestations. In one study, it was found that on an average in a pregnant mother the left ventricular mass increased by 52% in about 9 months. When this was compared with the increase in the left ventricular mass of athletes, it was found that they register an increase of only 25% over a long period of 24 months. This means that the mother gets a much lesser time to bring about the necessary cardiac changes than even the robustly training athletes....