When Ann O’Neill suffered a stillbirth in 2018, she was bewildered. She was already a mother to three healthy children and therefore had received no information on stillbirth prevention from her doctors. But when she brought the placental pathology results from the son she lost to Harvey Kliman, a physician-scientist specializing in pregnancy complications at the Yale School of Medicine, he found one critical abnormality that had been overlooked: a very small placenta. 

Each year, about 21,000 stillbirths occur in the United States. Previous research has found that abnormalities in the placenta, the organ that a fetus depends on for oxygen, fluids, and nutrients, are associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes, including stillbirth. Measuring placental volume is an important step toward identifying pregnancies with one such abnormality — a placenta that is disproportionately small relative to the size of its fetus. 

But placental monitoring is rare, in part because the organ’s irregular geometry — often compared to a beanie cap — makes the placenta difficult to measure. Virtual Organ Computer-aided Analysis (VOCAL), the current method for measuring volume by ultrasound, requires advanced equipment, trained operators, and time to perform a three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound.

Now, however, a new study, published in The Journal of Perinatal Medicine, points to a promising, accessible alternative to VOCAL: Estimated Placental Volume (EPV), an inexpensive, rapid method that can be performed with two-dimensional (2D) ultrasound equipment. This method, the study shows, provides placental volume estimates that are almost identical to those produced by VOCAL.

Ultrafine particles (UFPs) –smaller than 100 nanometres and invisible to the naked eye – contribute substantially to illness and mortality worldwide. That is the finding of an international study led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz and The Cyprus Institute, with cardiologists from Mainz University Medical Center among the co-authors. The researchers estimate that around 1.99 million deaths per year worldwide are attributable to exposure to ultrafine particles. That accounts for about five percent of all deaths from non-communicable diseases. Roughly half of these are due to cardiovascular disease. The researchers therefore advocate for binding limit values. The study appears in the journal Cardiovascular Research (Oxford University Press, the journal of the European Society of Cardiology).