Word: fetal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shabby five-story building pile surplus furniture in the crowded hallways and push patients around on jerry-rigged gurneys made with bicycle wheels. Yet Nan Davis has traveled halfway around the globe to undergo a new procedure available only here. Six hours ago, Dr. Huang Hongyun injected 1.5 million fetal cells into her damaged spinal cord. Davis, a teacher from Ohio, hasn't walked since 1978 after a car crash left her paralyzed from the bottom of her rib cage down. Shortly after she awakens, Davis signals with a thumb and index finger that she can feel nearly two inches...
...Huang's novel procedure involves injecting cells from a fetal olfactory bulb, the part of the brain where nose cells terminate, into the damaged area of the spinal cord. Huang says the transplanted olfactory cells help repair damaged nerve cells in the spine. Although he hasn't yet published his findings, the results so far seem compelling. "I'm pretty convinced of definite sensory improvement and modest motor improvement" in Huang's patients, says Dr. Wise Young, a prominent expert in spinal injuries and chairman of cell biology and neuroscience at Rutgers University (where Huang studied under Young...
...Huang, in turn, considers Western research standards too strict. He says some Americans insist his results will remain inconclusive until he conducts a double-blind study, which would mean operating on some patients but not injecting them with the fetal cells that could help them. "Even if it were legal, it's unethical," he says. And he rejects the idea that a lack of experimental controls undermines his claim to having developed a successful technique. "We can compare what happens to people before and after the procedure, and that is enough," Huang says. "The operation is safe, doable and effective...
...belief. A study of 70 mothers found that women with high anxiety levels from weeks 12 to 22 of their pregnancies were more likely to have children who act out or are hyperactive as 8-and 9-year-olds. While maternal stress can trigger physiological events that might affect fetal development, the exact mechanism is not clear. Also uncertain is whether the anxious moms were themselves genetically predisposed to hyperactivity. Researchers hope that timely intervention might benefit both anxious mothers-to-be and their kids...
...jury award caught the attention of obstetricians everywhere. It and similar cases have contributed to the increased use of caesareans when a fetal-heart monitor indicates even minor signs of trouble. Today more than one-quarter of U.S. births are by C-section (up from 5% in 1970), though fear of malpractice suits is just one factor in the trend. Meanwhile, medical research has been challenging the conventional wisdom that birth trauma was the principal culprit in cerebral palsy. "There seems to be no scientific question that most of that injury [cerebral palsy] occurs prenatally and is not related...