Second-look laparoscopy in ovarian cancer.

Forty-six patients with epithelial ovarian cancer previously treated with surgery, chemotherapy or external radiation underwent second-look laparoscopy to evaluate management. Twenty of the patients had positive laparoscopic findings and were not subjected to further laparotomy. The frequency of positive findings was related to the stage of the disease.

Selective survival of only the healthy fetus following prenatal diagnosis of thalassaemia major in binovular twin gestation.

Selective feticide is the procedure of choice when, in twin binovular pregnancy, only one of the fetuses is shown to be affected. As the probabilities for this condition are almost 1:2 when the genetic disease is due to homozygosity for two autosomal recessive genes, the problem is expected to occur frequently among the ever increasing number of couples seeking prenatal diagnosis of thalassaemia and the haemoglobinopathies. The present report is the first case of this condition and the ninth in the overall medical literature.

The use of 15-methylated derivative of prostaglandin F2a for the therapeutic termination of pregnancy and management of late fetal death.

The administration of 15-me-PGF 2a for the therapeutic termination of pregnancy and management of intrauterine death of the embryo during the second and third trimester of pregnancy was studied in 92 patients. Of these, 52 came because of intrauterine death with an average gestational age of 28.7 weeks while the rest came for therapeutic termination of pregnancy with an average gestational age of 21 weeks.

Psychosocial stress and its relation to obstetrical complications.

A Greek adaptation of the Schedule of Recent Experience of Holmes and Rahe was employed to study the relationship of psychosocial stress to symptoms during pregnancy, obstetric complications, family planning and breast feeding. An initial experiment with 130 pregnant women in the third trimester indicated that psychosocial stress was not related to education, whether they were from Athens or the provinces, nor age. The second experiment with 103 mothers 3 or 4 days after delivery indicated that high psychosocial stress is related to increased symptom scores during pregnancy and to obstetric complications.