OBJECTIVES To evaluate whether the measurement of maternal serum inhibin A, activin A and placental growth factor (PlGF) at 12 + 0 to 16 + 0 weeks of gestation alone or in combination with second-trimester uterine artery Doppler pulsatility index (PI) is useful in predicting pre-eclampsia. METHODS This was a case-control study of pre-eclampsia. From pregnant women attending their first antena...

OBJECTIVES To examine whether the maternal serum concentration of the soluble receptor-1 of tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-R1) at 11-13 weeks of gestation in pregnancies that subsequently develop pre-eclampsia is different from that in women without this complication. METHODS The concentration of TNF-R1 at 11 + 0 to 13 + 6 weeks was measured in samples from 128 cases that subsequently devel...

BACKGROUND An increase in cryptorchidism has been reported in many countries. One mechanism could be low fetal testosterone production possibly secondary to altered placental human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG) release. Our Objective was to compare hCG values from maternal blood between boys with cryptorchidism and normal boys. METHODS Total hCG and α-fetoprotein (AFP) values [12-16 weeks of ...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether in smokers there is a significant dose dependency between the number of cigarettes per day and levels of free ss-hCG and pregnancy-associated plasma protein A (PAPP-A) at 11-13(+6) weeks of gestation. METHODS This was a retrospective analysis of the maternal serum free ss-hCG and PAPP-A levels in relation to the maternal smoking status in 109 263 chromosomally nor...

INTRODUCTION The use of metal-on-metal (MoM) total hip arthroplasty (THA) increased in the last decades. A release of metal products (i.e. particles, ions, metallo-organic compounds) in these implants may cause local and/or systemic adverse reactions. Metal ion concentrations in body fluids are surrogate measures of metal exposure. OBJECTIVE To systematically summarize and critically appraise...

Efficient numerical-asymptotic electromagnetic simulations of electrically large structures are presented based on an iterative hybridization of the method of moments (MoM) and physical optics (PO) in a higher order computational framework. The iterative MoM-PO technique employs multiple reflections between PO currents nested within an overall iterative MoM-PO multiple-reflection process. The r...