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Advanced abdominal pregnancy is understood to mean any extra-uterine pregnancy found within the peritoneal cavity that is greater than 20 weeks gestation. Its management is one of laparotomy with varying complications including poor perinatal outcome and increased maternal morbidity and mortality. There is no accepted consensus for the complete removal of the placenta at laparotomy. This paper reports the management of a unique case of advanced abdominal pregnancy that was diagnosed by ultrasound at 20 weeks gestation and treated conservatively until delivery of a viable female neonate at 33 weeks and 4 days by elective laparotomy. At the time of laparotomy, the placenta was removed completely with good maternal outcome. This, to the best of our knowledge, is the first case in the West Indian literature documenting complete removal of the placenta at the time of laparotomy with good maternal outcome.

Asthma is a complex disease and the intricate interplay between genetic and environmental factors underlies the overall phenotype of the disease. Families with at least two siblings with asthma were collected from Europe, Australia and the US. A genome scan using a set of 364 families with a panel of 396 microsatellite markers was conducted. Nonparametric linkage analyses were conducted for asthma and three asthma-related phenotypes: bronchial hyper-reactivity (BHR), strict definition of asthma and atopic asthma. Nine chromosomal regions with LOD scores greater than 1.5 were identified (chromosomes 1q, 2p, 3q, 4p, 4q, 6q, 12q, 20p and 21). Linkage refinement analysis was performed for three BHR loci by genotyping single nucleotide polymorphisms at an average marker density of 1 cM. The LOD scores increased to 3.07 at chromosome 4p and 4.58 at chromosome 2p, while the chromosome 6p locus did not refine. The LOD score at the chromosome 2p locus is highly significant on a genome-wide basis. The refined locus covers a region with a physical size of 12.2 Mb. Taken together, these results provide evidence for a major asthma susceptibility locus on chromosome 2p.