[Maternal hyperthermia during pregnancy in severely multi-disabled children]

In a study of prenatal etiologic factors for 5,901 severely multi-disabled children (jushoji as called in Japan), 159 patients were found to have been exposed to maternal febrile illnesses in utero. Among them, 57 patients did not have any causative factors other than maternal febrile illness. In addition to severe brain dysfunction, nonspecific anomalies were found in 46.2% of 26 children exposed to maternal hyperthermia before 4 months of gestation. The recent findings of other investigators tend to support the concept of unusual hyperthermia being teratogenic in human. Our retrospective study suggested that maternal hyperthermia might induce severe brain damage of embryo, but no definite malformation complex could be determined.