The aim of this study was to find out the effect of fetal sex on maternal serum total testosterone level and its application for fetal sex determination. Journal of Biology and Life Science ISSN 2157-6076 2014, Vol. 5, No. 2 www.macrothink.org/jbls 59 Forty healthy pregnant (second trimester) females were recruited in the study from rural areas of district Dir lower, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakista...

Olfactory cues play an integral, albeit underappreciated, role in mediating vertebrate social and reproductive behaviour. These cues fluctuate with the signaller's hormonal condition, coincident with and informative about relevant aspects of its reproductive state, such as pubertal onset, change in season and, in females, timing of ovulation. Although pregnancy dramatically alters a female's en...

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the number one cause of disability worldwide and is comorbid with many chronic diseases, including obesity/metabolic syndrome (MetS). Women have twice as much risk for MDD and comorbidity with obesity/MetS as men, although pathways for understanding this association remain unclear. On the basis of clinical and preclinical studies, we argue that prenatal matern...

OBJECTIVES RASSF1A has been described to be differentially methylated between fetal and maternal DNA and can therefore be used as a universal sex-independent marker to confirm the presence of fetal sequences in maternal plasma. However, this requires highly sensitive methods. We have previously shown that Pyrophosphorolysis-activated Polymerization (PAP) is a highly sensitive technique that can...

BACKGROUND Prenatal ultrasonography has remained a universal tool but little is known especially from developing countries on clients' reasons for desiring it. Then aim was to determine the reasons why pregnant women will desire a prenatal ultrasound. METHODS It was a cross-sectional survey of consecutive 222 women at 2 different ultrasonography facilities in Ibadan, South-west Nigeria. RES...

Fetal exposure to synthetic glucocorticoids reprograms distinct neural circuits in the developing brain, often in a sex-specific manner, via mechanisms that remain poorly understood. To reveal whether such reprogramming is associated with select molecular signatures, we characterized the transcriptome of primary, embryonic mouse cerebral cortical and hypothalamic neural progenitor/stem cells de...

background: in most cancer cases, the treatment choice for a pregnant patient is radiotherapy. in these patients, the abdomen is usually not exposed therefore fetus exposure is due to peripheral dose (pd). the purpose of this study was to estimate the fetal dose (the maximum pd in each pregnancy stage) for modalities available and to fabricate and evaluate a generally applicable fetal shield. m...

Cell-free DNA testing is a recently introduced method for screening pregnant women for fetal trisomy, which is associated with some common significant genetic diseases, as well as the sex of the fetus. The case described here demonstrates the connection between the ultrasound "vanishing twin" phenomenon and the misdiagnosis of prenatal sex using cell-free DNA testing.

BACKGROUND Restriction in fetal growth is associated with cardiovascular disease in adulthood. It is unclear whether abnormal intrauterine growth influences arterial morphology during the fetal or neonatal stage. The objective was to study the regional arterial morphology with respect to gestational age and abnormal fetal body size. METHODS AND RESULTS We studied body anthropometrics and arte...

AIM To determine the neurodevelopmental morbidity in the surviving twin after fetal or infant death of the co-twin. METHODS Twin pregnancies with an antepartum or infant death delivered between 1981 and 1992 were identified from the Northern Perinatal Mortality Survey. Information on the neurodevelopmental morbidity of infant survivors of a deceased co-twin was obtained by a questionnaire sen...