Smoking is the leading cause of preventable illness in the world today. Prenatal cigarette smoke exposure (PCSE) is a particularly insidious form because so many of its associated health effects befall the unborn child and produce behavioural outcomes that manifest themselves only years later. Among these are the associations between PCSE and conduct disorders, which have been mostly ascribed t...

Fetal MRI is a rapidly emerging diagnostic imaging tool. Its main focus is currently on brain imaging, but there is a huge potential for whole body studies. We propose a method for accurate and robust localisation of the fetal brain in MRI when the image data is acquired as a stack of 2D slices misaligned due to fetal motion. We first detect possible brain locations in 2D images with a Bag-of-W...

Neuropeptides and their receptors may play a role in the growth and/or differentiation of fetal brain transplants. Previously, we found that gas-trin releasing peptide (GRP) receptors develop on fetal cortex grafts transplanted into the adult rat cortex, spinal cord or 4th ventricle/1,2/. Here we investigated the presence of vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) receptors in rat fetal brain trans...

We examined the effect of streptozotocin-induced maternal diabetes of 6-day duration and 4- to 24-h intracerebroventricular and systemic hyperinsulinism on fetal brain neuropeptide Y (NPY) synthesis and concentrations. Maternal diabetes (n = 6) leading to fetal hyperglycemia (5-fold increase; P < 0.05) and normoinsulinemia caused a 40% decline (P < 0.05) in fetal brain NPY messenger RNA (mRNA) ...

Neuroactive steroids may be synthesised in the brain either de novo from cholesterol or from blood-borne precursors. Concentrations of a GABAA receptor agonist, allopregnanolone, in the fetal brain exceed those in the circulation, and are markedly higher than adult brain concentrations. We used fetal hypophysectomy or adrenalectomy to elucidate the contribution of hypothalamic-pituitary factors...

PURPOSE 1) To evaluate and classify the indications for fetal brain MRI in a tertiary referral center. 2) To assess the contribution of fetal brain MRI to fetal neurosonography. MATERIALS AND METHODS A retrospective study in a tertiary medical center during a two-year period (2011 - 2012) included pregnant women who underwent fetal brain MRI. MRI was implemented at 32 weeks of gestation unles...

This study investigates the in vivo dose response profiles of the target enzyme cholinesterase (ChE) and the detoxifying enzymes carboxylesterase (CaE) in the fetal and maternal compartments of pregnant rats dosed with chlorpyrifos [(O,O'-diethyl O-3,5,6-trichloro-2-pyridyl) phosphorothionate], a commonly used organophosphorus insecticide. Pregnant rats were dosed daily (po) with chlorpyrifos i...

Motion correction is a key element for imaging the fetal brain in-utero using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Maternal breathing can introduce motion, but a larger effect is frequently due to fetal movement within the womb. Consequently, imaging is frequently performed slice-by-slice using single shot techniques, which are then combined into volumetric images using slice-to-volume reconstruct...