Cocaine use by pregnant women has a variety of effects on the embryo and fetus [5], ranging from various gastro-intestinal and cardiac defects to tissue death from insufficient blood supply. Thus, cocaine has been termed a teratogen, or an agent that causes defects in fetuses during prenatal development. Cocaine is one of the most commonly used drugs in the US and it has a history of both medic...

BACKGROUND Inorganic arsenic has been used by many laboratories to study the pathogenesis of exencephaly in rodents. These studies, which used predominantly injection exposures, coupled with the paucity of epidemiology data, resulted in the erroneous inference that inorganic arsenic should be considered a human teratogen. METHODS This study assembles and assesses literature analyses of older ...

Methotrexate and aminopterin are folic acid antagonists that inhibit dihydrofolate reductase, resulting in a block in the synthesis of thymidine and inhibition of DNA synthesis. Methotrexate has been used for the treatment of malignancy, rheumatic disorders, and psoriasis and termination of intrauterine pregnancy. Recently, methotrexate has become a standard treatment for ectopic pregnancy. The...

Methylene blue (MB) is a cationic thiazine dye with the chemical name tetramethylthionine chloride. It has a characteristic deep blue color in the oxidized state, but the reduced form, leukomethylene blue (LMB), is colorless. Methylene blue has been widely used in a variety of clinical settings to identify anatomic (Manhes et al., ’94; Sills and Zinkham, ’94; Barber et al., ’95) and pathologic ...

Polychlorinated biphenyls, synthetic hydrocarbon compounds once used as hydraulic fluids and lubricants in electrical transformers and capacitors, are among the most ubiquitous and persistent environmental contaminants. Although banned in most Western nations since the 1970s, substantial residues of these compounds persist in air, water, soil, and sediment world wide (Swain, ’83) and can be det...

It is apparent that there are many unanswered questions about the pathogenesis of CRS. For instance, the chance of embryonic infection decreases in the second semester only to increase again in the third trimester. This is presumably due to unspecified changes in the placenta. When the embryo is infected early in the first trimester it does not appear to have any conventional immunological resp...

Although the internet may play a role in providing proper teratogen-risk counselling for pregnant women, the experience with this type of service has not been reported. We aimed to compare the pregnancy outcome of women counselled by the internet to women that received typically in-clinic teratogen risk counselling in the clinic. In a prospective cohort design, 1,011 patients were counselled in...