Abstract
Summary
Vascular clamping of the pregnant rat uterus results in congenital malformations, fetal growth retardation, and embryonic death. Varying the temperature of the clamped uterus can modify the effects of the clamping procedure. Two and one-half hours of clamping the 8 day pregnant uterus maintained at 35°C resulted in fetal mortality of 100%. With the same clamping procedure and a uterine temperature of 4°C the fetal mortality was 16.7%. Weight reduction and malformation rates were also reduced by lowering the temperature of the clamped horn. These results substantiate the concept that uterine vascular clamping results in congenital malformations via a disturbance in some metabolic pathway. They also show that the uterine vascular clamping can be utilized to isolate one uterine horn for extended periods for the study of fetal drug effects and maternal fetal relationships.
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