The health risks posed by mercury contaminated fish is sufficient to warrant issuing a worldwide general warning to the public ? especially children and women of childbearing age – to be careful about how much and which fish they eat.
Women who smoke during pregnancy can cause permanent vascular damage in their children ? increasing their risk for stroke and heart attack, researchers said at the American Heart Association?s 47th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention.
Giving choline to infants who were exposed in the womb to alcohol may mitigate some of the resulting problems. Prenatal alcohol exposure affects physical and central nervous system development, putting children at risk for fetal alcohol spectrum disorders that at their worst include full-blown fetal alcohol syndrome.
Researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have developed an experimental vaccine that reduces stillbirths among rodents born to mothers infected with cytomegalovirus (CMV) — a common virus that can also cause mental retardation and hearing loss in newborn children who were infected in early fetal life.
Obesity is generally discussed in terms of caloric intake (how much a person eats) and energy output (how much a person exercises). However, according to a University of Missouri-Columbia scientist, environmental chemicals found in everyday plastics and pesticides also may influence obesity.
Obesity is generally discussed in terms of caloric intake (how much a person eats) and energy output (how much a person exercises). However, according to a University of Missouri-Columbia scientist, environmental chemicals found in everyday plastics and pesticides also may influence obesity.
There is no convincing evidence that taking omega-3 fatty acids on their own can alleviate depression, says Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin (DTB).
Healthy and viable mice that survive until adulthood have, for the first time, been cloned from adult stem cells. Scientists from Rockefeller University, including Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Elaine Fuchs, used cells called keratinocyte stem cells, which represent a new model system for cloning. Keratinocytes come from the skin, making them a particularly attractive stem cell source because of their ready accessibility.
Mice engineered to have cleft palates can be rescued in utero by injecting the mothers with a small molecule to correct the defect, say scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.
Pregnancy at age 40 and beyond is an independent risk factor for intrauterine fetal demise or stillbirth, according to an abstract presented by Yale School of Medicine researchers at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine Conference February 10 in San Francisco.