[Progress report. What can one expect from a "functional prenatal toxicology?"]

In the strategy of investigation applied and demanded in prenatal toxicology partial aspects have been overstressed until now, although here as well as in postnatal toxicology the problems should be viewed in its complexity (in this case, F1-generation in its several pre- and postnatal stages of development). Therefore, there was the urgent need to summarize the existing methods of functional investigation in the field of prenatal toxicology and to compare them with conventional morphological methods as to their meaningfulness and sensitivity. As a result, the routine introduction of clinical-functional investigations is demanded.