Late pregnancy screening for preeclampsia with a urinary point-of-care test for misfolded proteins.

The aim was to describe and assess a new late pregnancy point-of-care urinary preeclampsia screening test. Urine samples were collected from a consecutive series of 1,532 pregnant women hospitalized at 20-41 weeks gestation in a Chinese single obstetric unit. A simple disposable Congo red based device was newly developed and employed to prospectively test misfolded proteins in pregnant women's urine. A total of 140 preeclampsia cases were clinically diagnosed, 101 severe and 87 pre-term. Detection and false positive rates were similar in the training and validation subsets with combined 74% and 3.0%. The detection rate was 83% in severe, 86% in pre-term, 49% and 50% in mild and term cases (P<0.0001) respectively. In conclusion, a simple point-of-care urinary test for misfolded proteins can be used to screen for preeclampsia in late pregnancy with very high screening performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to screen for preeclampsia using Congo red based device in Chinese pregnant population.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

I have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: X.Li and J.X. are employed by Shuwen Biotech, which manufactures the CapCord test described and evaluated in this paper. H.C. is a paid consultant of PerkinElmer Life Science which has a commercial partnership with Shuwen Biotech. X.Liu and J.D. have no competing interests to declare. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.