"The brain malformations may result from blood clots that circulate from the placenta to the developing brain," Brown said. "This would cause cell death and a hole to form called a cortical cleft. This finding suggests an answer to the question, 'Why did this baby die?' to parents and physicians who look for underlying medical causes to explain the death of many preterm babies."
The malformations were found using ultrasound and MRI scans during autopsies of premature infants that had died soon after birth. Brown and his team looked at brain tissues from 33 premature babies accumulated over a nine year period. Thirty-one had these brain malformations.
"Normally, you would not be able to find these malformations in a live patient using ultrasound," Brown said. "They are too small. But after autopsy, our specialized staining procedures make these lesions easier to see. "
While it is not yet known how to prevent these malformations, Brown and his team hope that by understanding how these lesions occur, strategies can be developed to prevent them and the subsequent preterm birth and early death.
"We suspect from our studies that the lesions originate early in pregnancy around the end of the first trimester or start of the second trimester," he said. "Sometime after the damage to the brain has occurred, something causes the mother to go into premature labor. Babies with large malformations die within hours or da
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Contact: Rae Beasley
rabeasle@wfubmc.edu
336-716-6878
Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center
3-May-2003