BACKGROUND The management of women with prosthetic heart valves during pregnancy poses a particular challenge as there are no available controlled clinical trials to provide guidelines for effective antithrombotic therapy. Oral anticoagulants such as warfarin sodium cause fetal embryopathy; subcutaneous administration of heparin sodium has been reported to be ineffective in preventing thromboem...

BACKGROUND In utero exposure to thalidomide causes a wide range of birth defects, including phocomelia, hearing loss and visceral disorders, known as thalidomide embryopathy (TE). Fifty years after the first report of TE, we conducted the first cross-sectional multicenter study to investigate the development of lifestyle-related diseases and identify risk factors for visceral disorders in subje...

Environmental agents including ethanol, 13-cis retinoic acid (RA, Accutane), the antimetabolite methotrexate, periods of hypoxia, ionizing radiation or hyperthermic stress, when administered acutely to pregnant experimental animals, induce stage-dependent craniofacial malformations comparable to those in corresponding human teratogen syndromes. Acute treatment regimens have allowed analysis of ...

Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) from all causes of diabetes is the most common medical complication of pregnancy and is increasing in incidence, particularly as type 2 diabetes continues to increase worldwide. Despite advances in perinatal care, infants of diabetic mothers (IDMs) remain at risk for a multitude of physiologic, metabolic, and congenital complications such as preterm birth, ma...

Owing to the reports of microcephaly as a consistent outcome in the fetuses of pregnant women infected with ZIKV in Brazil, Zika virus (ZIKV)-microcephaly etiomechanistic relationship has recently been implicated. Researchers, however, are still struggling to establish an embryological basis for this interesting causal handcuff. The present study reveals robust evidence in favor of a plausible ...

OBJECTIVES This report describes our experience with the use of an anticoagulant regimen of adjusted doses of subcutaneous heparin during pregnancy in women with cardiac valve prostheses. BACKGROUND Gravid patients with prosthetic heart valves require long-term anticoagulant therapy. To avoid the increased incidence of fetal morbidity and mortality associated with the use of coumarin agents i...

Fetal warfarin syndrome (FWS) or warfarin (coumadin) embryopathy is a rare condition as a result of fetal exposure to maternal ingestion of warfarin during pregnancy. A male infant, whose mother was treated with the anticoagulant (warfarin) because of a mechanical heart valve replacement after rheumatic heart disease, presented with signs of warfarin embryopathy. The facial dysmorphism included...

A time to refocus I suspect that many rheumatologists in the UK are unaware that the origins of our speciality were closely bound up with government schemes to improve employment opportunities. The Second World War left behind injured servicemen and women and civilians; repairing both physical and mental damage was a priority. Large numbers of injured and unemployed workers needed assistance at...

Thalidomide was banned worldwide in the 1960s due to its teratogenicity, and remained so until the late 1990s when it returned to physicians’ armamentarium as a medicine for a variety of inflammatory diseases and hematological malignancies that were difficult to treat. A landmark event in this resurgence was the discovery that thalidomide inhibited angiogenesis in the rabbit cornea micropocket ...

The morphogenetic function of the transient phase of cell death that occurs during blastocyst maturation is not known but it is thought that its regulation results from a delicate balance between survival and lethal signals in the uterine milieu. In this paper, we show that blastocysts from diabetic rats have a higher incidence of dead cells than control embryos. Differential lineage staining i...