Because of contradictory reports of pregnancy outcomes and coffee intake, this study was designed to determine how hormone metabolite levels, symptoms, and coffee consumption patterns are related. Eligible subjects were recruited in Cincinnati, Ohio, from 1996 to 1998, aged 18-40 years, and nonsmokers; drank at least 18 ounces (1 ounce = 29.6 ml) of coffee per week (including decaffeinated) at ...

Preeclampsia is a devastating pregnancy-associated disorder affecting 5% to 8% of pregnant women worldwide. It emerges as an autoimmune-driven disease, and, among others, the autoantibodies against angiotensin type 1 receptor II have been proposed to account for preeclampsia symptoms. Despite much attention focused on describing autoantibodies associated with preeclampsia, there is no clue conc...

Ectopic production and secretion of hormones by a wide variety of tumors has been known for decades. Initially, ectopic hormone secretion was recognized by signs and symptoms of excess circulating biologically active hormone. With development of more sophisticated assay techniques, biologically inactive fragments and "big" forms of authentic hormones have been identified in these syndromes. Rec...

The present study is designed to elucidate certain biological characteristics of urinary chorionic gonadotropin and to see what differences could be demonstrated between HCG in normal pregnancy and in the trophoblastic diseases. We have attempted the biological characterization of HCG using crude HCG and the purified HCG (12 ,000 I.U./mg) by zone electrophoresis on starch grain and chromatograp...

The unsatisfactory standardization of many immunoassays is fairly well recognized, but the problem is hard to tackle (1 ). Recently, studies on the performance of immunoassays for testosterone in female serum (2 ) and for urinary cortisol (1 ) have revealed that the quality of some widely used assays is totally unsatisfactory. The quality of assays for human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) has als...