Selecting placental measures that have clinical implications in child development and diseases

The problem with using the birthweight:placental weight ratio as a measure of placental efficiency

“…We examined aspects of placental pathology previously found to be associated with childhood disease in this cohort [13]: Type of cord insertion, the size of infarcts observed upon gross examination of the placenta and, from microscopic placental examination, the presence of thrombosis or necrosis in the fetal surface vasculature, stromal fibrosis or pathological edema in the terminal villi, and the presence of intervillous thrombi and/or adjacent villous infarction. In addition, we also examined placental pathologies expected to reduce the functional exchange surface: the presence of hemorrhage and/ or decidual necrosis (both observed upon gross examination) and the apparent maturity of the placenta, assessed upon microscopic examination.…”

Preterm birth with placental evidence of malperfusion is associated with cardiovascular risk factors after pregnancy: a prospective cohort study

“…13, 17, 18 A detailed description of placental lesion definitions is provided in Supplemental Table 1. 19–22 During this period, placental pathologists prepared all reports following a standardized protocol using a uniform reporting approach and identical diagnostic criteria.…”

“…Presence of placental lesions was abstracted from the clinical pathology reports of women with PTB and categorised according to proposed schemas as placental malperfusion (vasculopathy, infarct, accelerated villous maturation, perivillous fibrin deposition, intervillous fibrin deposition), intra-uterine infection/inflammation (III, acute chorioamnionitis, acute funisitis, acute vasculitis, acute deciduitis), villitis of unknown aetiology (a marker of chronic inflammation), fetal thrombosis or chorangiosis. 13,17,18 A detailed description of placental lesion definitions is provided in Supporting Information Table S1. [19][20][21][22] During this period, placental pathologists prepared all reports following a standardised protocol using a uniform reporting approach and identical diagnostic criteria.…”

Creating a placental inflammatory composite index that has a high prognostic relevance to child morbidity

“…Based on its nature of constraint, LASSO shrinks the estimated coefficients with little or no significance towards exactly zero leading to dimensionality reduction of high‐dimensional data . The amount of shrinkage varies according to the value of the tuning parameter, which is often determined by cross‐validation . Unlike a regular multiple linear regression (ordinary least squares), LASSO can control the multicollinearity resulting from the highly correlated variables and performs shrinkage and automatic variable selection simultaneously .…”

“…Both accuracy and interpretation are improved when the number of variables is significantly reduced to a more manageable number and the most useful and relevant ones are selected . A more detailed description of LASSO has been provided elsewhere …”