Sample collection was performed consistently to avoid contamination of embryonic samples with maternal membranes, as this would have jeopardized correct determination of chromosomal inheritance.
These groups were selected to describe the difference in child protection system contact and infant mortality between infants of women prisoners and infants within a general community sample with no maternal corrections history.
The assumption that under-five deaths would be adequately represented in a sample with sufficient maternal deaths would hold true even allowing for the possibility that fertility and child mortality may have declined substantially since the 2007 census date.
Analysis of cord blood samples was restricted to 48/52 samples where mixing with maternal blood was excluded using an alkaline denaturation test [ 13]; serum cytokine results were complete for these 48 samples.
These 508 mother-infant pairs were similar to the original sample with respect to maternal age (p = 0.74), maternal CES-D score (p = 0.85), and proportion of LBW infants (p = 0.81).
In the sample of 204 triads, no transmission distortion was apparent in the whole sample (TDT = 0.13, p = 0.72; Table 1) and in the sub-samples of families with maternal affection (TDT = 0.13, p = 0.72) or paternal affection (TDT = 0.17, p = 0.68).
The crude anthropometric measures by parental marital status were essentially equal in the full sample (N=3137) and in the reduced sample with non-missing maternal education (N=2968), indicating that the reduced sample is representative of the full sample.
When the children in the Community Perinatal Care Study were followed up in a study at three years of age, the participants constituted a demographically low risk sample with regards to maternal education and income [ 14].
Consistent with our findings, both research groups reported lower concentrations of PFASs in the cord serum compared with maternal samples.
Estriol is the major form of circulating estrogen during pregnancy [ 50] and measurements of estriol from maternal saliva samples appear to correlate with maternal serum levels [ 51, 52].
