[The biopsychosocial dimension of preeclampsia: a conceptual-empirical approach]

From the historical point of view, the toxemia of pregnancy have represented one of the most important clinical and epidemiological investigations related to the process of human reproduction. Remains and their significance is due largely to the close relationship that keeps the disease with the figures for maternal mortality, not only in Mexico but throughout the world. Proposes the addition of a guideline to establish a general explanatory principle to link causally the socioepidemiological and psychosocial characteristics of population groups susceptible to the processes clinical, pathophysiological, biochemical and molecular characteristics of disease. This concept refers to the stress, which is operationally defined as a psychobiological process mediator, whose term physiological, biochemical and molecular level is the translation of the organic individual's response to stimuli of various socio-cultural environment they perceive as threatening. Given the relevance of stress, it is considered appropriate to provide conceptual and empirical evidence supporting it as a centerpiece of the proposal. The association between preeclampsia and adverse psychosocial situation does not correspond to a causal relationship, because they correspond to processes located on different levels of organization. The significance of the results to display at the preeclampsia in a broader perspective, in which an adverse psychosocial situation, characteristic of specific contexts socioepidemiological determines the expression of individual risk factors (genetic, constitutional and obstetric), and this individual level in which psychological stress increases the vulnerability of the pregnant teenager.