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Emergency care in obstetric practice is fraught with medico-legal risk. This is especially true when the practitioner has no established relationship with the parturient and either mother or child sustains serious or permanent injury during the birth process. Although reform efforts have been proposed expanding limits to liability in certain settings where emergency care is provided, currently, obstetricians often must rely on the protection afforded by their respective state’s Good Samaritan statute.

Hypertension affects as many as 8% of all pregnancies. Not only does it pose complications during pregnancy, but even if it resolves after delivery, it places women at increased risk for cardiovascular disease. As such, these women should receive cardiovascular disease counseling and screening, including the monitoring of their blood pressure and cholesterol levels, implementation of lifestyle modifications, and awareness of heart attack symptoms.

Increases in the prevalence of asthma, especially in children, have raised concern in the medical community, resulting in research to find possible causes and to explore potential means of prevention. Recently there has been some evidence linking acetaminophen (known as paracetamol in New Zealand) use in pregnant women and subsequent increased risk for asthma in their offspring.

A new study compared female ever-smokers with never-smokers and found that ever smoking cigarettes increases the risk for invasive breast cancer by 9% and current smoking increases the risk 16%.

In an effort to quell the intractable problem of premature birth in the United States, the March of Dimes has joined with Stanford University School of Medicine in California to apply a transdisciplinary approach to the problem of prematurity.

In the latest step toward making noninvasive detection of fetal trisomy 21 a reality, researchers in California evaluated a multiplexed, massively parallel shotgun sequencing assay to identify women carrying a fetal trisomy 21 fetus.

Because research shows that women are more likely than men to forgo, delay and ration medical care because of personal debt incurred from healthcare costs and expenses, investigators set out to determine whether financial hardships associated with medical debt also differ by gender.