Average

Although during the last two decades there has been an explosive outflow of Information from many areas of perinatal medicine- Information on fetal blood flow has been based on direct deductions rather than blood measure-ments. Actually we know less about the regulation of the fetal placental blood flows than we do aboüt the regula-tion of the blood flow to any other organ. There are se-veral reasons for this. One is the complexity of the ar-terial supply to the Uterus. Another problem is the dif-ficulty of measuring blood flow because of the inaccessi-bility of the fetus and its sensitivity to infection. Fur-thermore the placenta is an organ which does not have just one blood flow but two, each of which comes from a separ-ate organism. For these reasons there is little classi-cal literature on this important System. It seems that recent ultrasound Doppier techniques will help in better understanding of the physiology and pathophysiology of fetal placental blood flow. In 1979 Kossoff and Gill from the Sydney group intro-duced direct measurements of umblical blood flow üsing Dop-pier ultrasound in combination with the real^time technique These new techniques opened up quite new possibilities of directly studying human fetal circulatory changes and is now being carefully investigated in several centres all over the world. In Zagreb we have over a year fs experi-ence using the Aloka Doppier Echograph machine. This technique was first applied to 200 normal preg-nancies from 30 to 41 weeks of gestation. (Table 1)