All News

The US Preventive Services Task Force's new guidelines for breast cancer screening were met with an outcry from many medical and consumer groups when they were published in November.

Electronic feta l heart rate (FHR) monitoring was introduced in the late 1960s with the hope of preventing intrapartum fetal brain injury and cerebral palsy (CP). However, it is now clear that this hope was unrealistic for at least 2 reasons. First, the false-positive rate of intrapartum FHR monitoring for predicting CP exceeds 99%. Except in the most extreme cases, intrapartum FHR monitoring has never been capable of reliably predicting CP.

Compared with nonsmoking mothers, mothers who smoke are less apt to breastfeed their babies. In addition, among mothers who smoke and who choose to breastfeed, the length of time during which they do so may be shortened, compared with nonsmoking mothers, according to new research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The use of blunt, as opposed to sharp, needles significantly reduces the rate of glove perforation-and perhaps needlesticks-for surgeons and assistants performing cesarean-delivery closure, according to the results of a randomized, controlled trial.

After a priority review, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved Xanodyne Pharmaceuticals' formulation of tranexamic acid tablets (Lysteda) for the treatment of cyclic menorrhagia.

Women prescribed penicillins, erythromycins, and cephalosporins for bacterial infections during their first trimester may be reassured that these ntibacterial agents are not significantly associated with birth defects, new research shows.

A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (9/23-9/30/09) suggests that if information about maternal complication rates at training hospitals were generally available, a woman would do well to choose her obstetrician on the basis of where he or she did residency.