Our purpose was to evaluate whether maternal and fetal hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) concentrations in pregnancies with small for gestational age (SGA) infants are different from those in pregnancies with appropriate for gestational age (AGA) infants. Maternal and fetal circulating HGF concentrations were compared between 55 pregnancies with AGA infants and 16 pregnancies with SGA infants at b...

___________________________________________________________________________ Background: Umbilical cord blood analysis may give a clue to the state of health of both pregnant mothers and their neonates. However, there is paucity of literature on some of these indices from our area. Objectives: This present study determined the red blood indices of maternal and umbilical cord blood in Owerri, Nig...

A previous analysis of the Project Viva cohort (eastern Massachusetts, 1999-2002 recruitment) found an association between higher second-trimester supplemental maternal calcium intake and lower systolic blood pressure in offspring at 6 months. The authors analyzed 5,527 systolic blood pressure measurements from 1,173 mother-child pairs from this same cohort when the children were aged 3 years. ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Maternal stress can depress birth weight and gestational age, with potential health effects. A growing number of studies examine the effect of maternal stress caused by environmental disasters on birth outcomes. These changes may indicate an adaptive response. In this study, we examine the effects of maternal exposure to wildfire on birth weight and gestational age, hy...

AIMS To determine the factors that affect why some infants receive higher exposures relative to the mother's body burden than do others. METHODS A total of 159 mother-infant pairs from a cohort of women receiving prenatal care at Magee-Womens Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA from 1992 to 1995 provided blood samples at delivery for lead determination. The difference between cord and maternal blood l...

BACKGROUND Maternal alloantibodies against HPA-1a can cross placenta, opsonize foetal platelets, and induce neonatal alloimmune thrombocytopenia (NAIT). In a study of 100, 448 pregnant women in Norway during 1995-2004, 10.6% of HPA-1a negative women had detectable anti-HPA-1a antibodies. DESIGN AND METHODS A possible correlation between the maternal ABO blood group phenotype, or underlying ge...

There is a growing concern about the potential health effects of exposure to various environmental chemicals during pregnancy and infancy. The placenta is expected to be an effective barrier protecting the developing embryo against some endocrine disruptors (EDs) circulating in maternal blood. The current study was designed to assess in utero exposure levels of non-persistent organic pollutants...

Recent research has raised the possibility that fetal lead exposure is not estimated adequately by measuring lead content in maternal whole blood lead because of the variable partitioning of lead in whole blood between plasma and red blood cells. Lead in maternal plasma may derive in large part from maternal bone lead stores. In this study we aimed to estimate the contribution of maternal whole...

The microbial environment in early infancy or even in utero may modulate the risk to develop allergic disease. Since Toll-like receptors (TLR) recognize microbial products, we hypothesized that maternal allergies may be associated with decreased levels of TLR2, TLR4 and CD14 mRNA in mothers and their offspring. 185 healthy pregnant women from Germany (n = 48), Hungary (n = 50) and Spain (n = 87...

BACKGROUND Prenatal exposure to both stress and aeroallergens (dust mite) may modulate the fetal immune system. These exposures may interact to affect the newborn immune response. We examined associations between prenatal maternal stress and cord blood total IgE in 403 predominately low-income minority infants enrolled in the Asthma Coalition on Community, Environment, and Social Stress (ACCESS...