Maternal and perinatal outcome of preeclampsia with an onset before 24 weeks' gestation. Audit in a tertiary referral center.

Objective: Preeclampsia, with an onset before 24 weeks' gestation is a rare but severe condition in pregnancy with little data of maternal and perinatal outcome, particularly after expectant management. We therefore, evaluated pregnancy outcome in these women at our department where temporising management was introduced as the standard policy in early onset preeclampsia.

Study Design: We analysed retrospectively all consecutive women with preeclampsia, with an onset before 24 weeks' gestation, between 1 January 1993 and 31 December 2002 at a tertiary university referral center.

How women deal with the results of serum screening for Down syndrome in the second trimester of pregnancy.

To gain insight into how pregnant women experience serum screening for Down syndrome, we sent questionnaires to two groups of relevant subjects in the north of the Netherlands. The questionnaires addressed the following issues: decision-making process, knowledge and opinions. Questionnaire A was sent to women of 36 years of age and older (n=99) (group A) who were all 20 to 36 weeks pregnant at that time.