In clinical use, however, factors such as contamination of the sample with maternal blood, sampling within 24 hours after intercourse, and preeclampsia may reduce the accuracy of the test and give false positive results [ 13- 15].
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 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.
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 relative importance of these two pathways needs to be investigated in older and younger birth cohorts and in samples with a wider maternal age range.
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].
We measured gene expression in whole head samples of newborn mice with maternal and paternal uniparental duplication (UpDp) of distal Chr 2 (13), which includes the Blcap locus.
Although PCT may cross the placental barrier, the findings of higher PCT concentrations in cord sera compared with maternal samples, with even larger differences at 24 and 48 h of age, cannot be explained on the grounds of maternal transfer alone; therefore, the postnatal surge of PCT most likely represents endogenous synthesis [ 29].
