Creasy and Resnik’s Maternal-Fetal Medicine: Principles and Practice
6th ed, 1282 pp, $199
Philadelphia, PA, Saunders/Elsevier, 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-4160-4224-2
- Aaron B. Caughey, MD, PhD, ReviewerDepartment of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive SciencesUniversity of California, San Francisco abcmd@berkeley.edu
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
- KEYWORDS:
- INFANT
- INFANT, NEWBORN, DISEASES
- MATERNAL-FETAL RELATIONS
- OBSTETRICS
- PREGNANCY, HIGH-RISK
- WOMEN'S HEALTH
Maternal-fetal medicine is a relatively recent subspecialty; its professional organization, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, will be holding its 30th annual meeting in 2010. The field began with a focus on high-risk obstetrics, but more recently, with the advent of sophisticated real-time ultrasound, it has expanded to include prenatal diagnosis and fetal intervention. Even high-risk obstetrics, which focuses on caring for women with medical illness who become pregnant or who develop a severe illness during pregnancy, could only have developed in the 20th century, alongside the other specialties that improved the treatment of illness to create a host of chronic diseases.
For example, prior to Banting's development of insulin in 1924, most women with type 1 diabetes mellitus did not survive long enough or were simply too physically compromised to become pregnant. If they did become pregnant, the outcomes were abysmal, with high rates of both maternal and fetal/neonatal mortality. …
