STUDY OBJECTIVE The aim was to study the relationship between birth prevalence of neural tube defect (including anencephaly) in Eastern Turkey before and after the Chernobyl disaster. DESIGN This was a prospective study of time trends in live births and stillbirths over the years 1985-1990. Medical and sociodemographic data were recorded for the mothers. SETTING Elazig, Eastern Turkey. SU...

BACKGROUND Periconceptional use of folic acid can reduce a woman's risk of having a baby with a neural-tube defect and other congenital abnormalities. METHOD Case reports of babies OO both males, who were delivered at term by emergency caesarean section by a 21 year old woman. At birth, both twins had neural tube defects, bilateral talipes equinovarusdeformity, bladder and bowel dysfunction. ...

OBJECTIVE To verify whether Down's syndrome and neural tube defects arise more often in the same family than expected by chance. DESIGN Population and familial survey. SETTING Network of maternity hospitals in the Latin American collaborative study of congenital malformations (ECLAMC) in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela between 198...

An earlier preliminary paper is expanded. Women who had given birth to one or more infants with a neural tube defect were recruited into a trial of per conceptional vitamin supplementation. Two hundred mothers attending five centres were fully supplemented (FS), 50 were partially supplemented (PS), and 300 were unsupplemented (US). Neural tube defect recurrences in the study pregnancies were 1 ...

Mice genetically deficient for the telomerase RNA (mTR) can be propagated for only a limited number of generations. In particular, mTR-/- mice of a mixed C57BL6/129Sv genetic background are infertile at the sixth generation and show serious hematopoietic defects. Here, we show that a percentage of mTR-/- embryos do not develop normally and fail to close the neural tube, preferentially at the fo...