Impact of prepregnant body mass index and maternal weight gain on the risk of pregnancy complications in Japanese women.

Background: To analyze the association of pregnancy complications with prepregnant body mass index and weight gain during pregnancy in Japanese women.

Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted with 21,718 Japanese women with a singleton pregnancy. Pregnant women were grouped by prepregnant body mass index and evaluated for association with pregnancy complications using multivariate logistic regression analysis.

Changed expression of heat shock proteins in various pathological findings in placentas with intrauterine fetal growth restriction.

Heat shock proteins (HSPs) are activated in the cells of most organisms in response to sublethal heat shock and other stressors. It has been reported that HSP27, HSP60, HSP70, and HSP90 are expressed in normal human placenta, and it was thought that these HSPs play a role in the demonstration of cell viability and function. In this study, we performed an immunohistochemical (IHC) study of these HSPs for 27 placentas that had complicated intrauterine fetal growth restriction (IUGR) and compared the IHC findings with the pathological findings.

Overexpression of estrogen receptor-alpha gene suppresses gap junctional intercellular communication in endometrial carcinoma cells.

Stimulation of the endometrium by estrogens without the differentiating effect of progestins is the primary etiological factor associated with the development of endometrial hyperplasia and adenocarcinoma. However, the correlation between sex steroids and gap junctional intercellular communication (GJIC), which is considered to play an important role in the control of cell growth and differentiation, is not well known in endometrial carcinoma. In this study, we focused on the influence of estrogen and its receptor in connexin (Cx) expression and GJIC in endometrial carcinoma cells, established stable clone IK-ER1 overexpressing ER-alpha to transfect the expression vector and analysed them in various hormonal conditions.

Correlation between responsiveness of neoadjuvant chemotherapy and apoptosis-associated proteins for cervical adenocarcinoma.

Objective: Adenocarcinoma of the uterine cervix appears to be increasing in prevalence and it has been suggested that these tumors tend to be less sensitive to radiation therapy and to chemotherapy than squamous carcinomas. In the present study, 29 patients with locally advanced cervical adenocarcinoma (bulky IB-IVB) were treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) using cisplatin, aclacinomycin-A and mitomycin-C, followed by radical surgery or irradiation.

Methods: To predict the prognosis and response to the chemotherapy, the expression of apoptosis associated-proteins, p53, p21WAF1/CIP1, Bcl-2 and activated caspase-3 was evaluated for tumor samples by immunohistochemistry.