Perinatal factors and the risk of atopic dermatitis: a cohort study.

Objective: To analyze the effects of pregnancy and early events in the newborn on the risk of subsequent atopic dermatitis (AD) during the first year of life.

Patients And Methods: This is a prospective multicenter cohort study of newborns during the first year of life. Newborns identified on random days in three obstetrics departments in the area of Bergamo, Lombardy, Northern Italy, were eligible.

One step endourologic management of severely encrusted stent in solitary kidney with renal impairment. A case report.

Removing a severely encrusted stent, without an initial preventive descaling of the calcification that envelopes it, can lead to serious complications such as the breaking up of the stent, lesions and ureteral avulsion. We report a case regarding an entirely endourological treatment of an encrusted stent in a single kidney patient with renal insufficiency. The time the stent had been in place was 6 months.

[Clinical characteristics of HCV infection in pregnancy: the role of sexual transmission].

Background: There is no uniformity of opinions about the possibility of sexual transmission of hepatitis-C-virus infection. Moreover the infection during pregnancy is often underestimated.

Methods: One hundred and seventy-eight anti-HCV-positive pregnant women were investigated to evaluate the incidence of HCV infection and the possibility of sexual transmission of the disease to the partners.

[Transcervical electric resection in submucous myomas].

Twenty-five patients underwent hysteroscopic resection of large symptomatic intrauterine fibroids. Patients were divided into one of three groups: those with pedunculated myomas (G0), those with intramural extension less than 50% (G1), and those with fibroids with intramural extension more than 50% (G2). In the first group (7 patients) the age ranged from 42-52 years (mean age 48 years), the operating time ranged from 15-60 min.

Evidence against a pathogenetic role for endothelin in pre-eclampsia.

Objective: To assess whether increased placental or systemic endothelin synthesis has a pathogenic role in pre-eclampsia (gestational proteinuric hypertension).

Design: Prospective observations study.

Subjects: 19 women with pre-eclampsia and 10 healthy pregnant women were studies.

Human placenta expresses endothelin gene and corresponding protein is excreted in urine in increasing amounts during normal pregnancy.

Systemic and renal hemodyanmic changes in normal pregnancy have been attributed in part to altered vascular synthesis of vasodilatory prostaglandins. Besides vasodilatory substances, endothelium also generates vasoconstrictors, including endothelin. We evaluated the capacity of placental tissue from normal pregnant women to express endothelin gene and to generate endothelin.

Urinary albumin excretion in normal pregnancy and pregnancy-induced hypertension.

We measured the urinary excretion of albumin in 67 healthy primigravidae, at monthly intervals, from 16 to 36 weeks of gestation and 12 weeks postpartum. Of the 67 primigravidae, 55 completed a normal pregnancy and 12 developed pregnancy-induced hypertension. In the latter group, an additional measurement of urinary albumin excretion was performed at 24 weeks postpartum.

[The complex relation of pregnancy and diabetes mellitus].

A glucose metabolism impairment occurs in about 2-3% of all pregnancies. Two different groups of women are involved: diabetic women who become pregnant and healthy women developing gestational diabetes or glucose intolerance during pregnancy. Due to therapeutic improvements and new techniques of fetal monitoring, maternal and perinatal mortality now approaches that of normal pregnancies.