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The aim of this brief communication was to determine the correlation between pre‐eclampsia (PE), Helicobacter pylori pathogenic strains seropositivity, and interleukin‐18 (IL‐18) levels. To this purpose 25 pre‐eclamptic women and 25 healthy parturient women of similar age were evaluated for:

• IL‐18 levels, by ELISA
• H. pylori seropositivity, by anti‐IgG ELISA
• Anti‐Cag‐A antibodies using a commercial immunoblot assay.

We report similar values of IL‐18 in our pre‐eclamptic patients and in healthy parturient women (respectively 350 ± 150 vs. 399 ± 132 pg ml⁻¹; p = 0.23). However the seropositivity for H. pylori was 84 and 32% (p < 0.001), and anti‐Cag‐A antibodies were present respectively in 80 and 28% of the two populations. On the basis of our data we hypothesize that H. pylori infection from Cag‐A strains can be involved in some cases of PE and that the microorganism could modulate IL …