Publications

Placental malaria is the primary mechanism through which malaria in pregnancy causes adverse perinatal outcomes.Malaria in pregnancy poses a great health risk to mother and her fetus and results into complications, such asabortion, still birth, intra uterine growth retardation, and low birth weight. The heavy infiltration of Plasmodiumfalciparum-infected RBCs in the intervillous spaces of placenta seems to be responsible for all the complicationsobserved. Infected RBCs in the placenta cause an inflammatory environment with increase in inflammatory cells andcytokines which is deleterious to the placenta. Increased inflammatory responses in the infected placenta result intooxidative stress that in turn causes oxidative stress-induced placental cell death. Moreover, heat shock proteins thatare produced in high concentration in stressed cells to combat the stress have been reported in fewer concentrationsin malaria-infected placenta. Pathologies associated with placental malaria seems to be the effect of a change inimmune status from antibody-mediated immune response to cell-mediated immune response resulting into excessinflammation, oxidative stress, apoptosis, and decreased heat shock protein expression. However, we also need tostudy other aspects of pathologies so that better drugs can be designed with new molecular targets. The mainstrategy to combat placenta malaria is intermittent preventative treatment in pregnancy; however, increasing drugresistance threatens the efficacy of this approach. There are studies dissecting the inflammatory response to placentalmalaria, alternative preventative treatments, and in developing a vaccine for placental malaria.