CARDIAC AND AORTIC ARCH ANOMALIES IN THE OFFSPRING OF VITAMIN A DEFICIENT RATS CORRELATED WITH SIMILAR HUMAN ANOMALIES

[摘要] Fetal and newborn rats from mothers fed vitamin A deficient diets prior to and during pregnancy exhibited some degree of malformation in 75% of the cases. Twenty-eight of 64 severely abnormal young studied after serial sectioning showed congenital cardiovascular malformations. These consisted of defects in the interventricular septum and in the aortico-pulmonary septum; and of various aortic arch anomalies, such as retroesophageal subclavian artery, right aortic arch, double aortic arch, absence and other variations of the ductus arteriosus and absence of a pulmonary artery. There were also several cases in which the fourth aortic arch was absent and the heart communicated with the descending aorta through the pulmonary trunk and an enlarged ductus arteriosus; in other instances the communication was affected through a persisting third arch which rose high into the neck.Many of the cardiovascular anomalies observed in the rats closely simulated malformations observed in man ; others have not been reported to occur in man but they are considered theoretic possibilities. If they are encountered in children, their interpretation may be facilitated by the description of these experimental results in the rat. It is emphasized that present clinical and experimental observations indicate that environmental as well as genetic factors may alter the development of the cardiovascular system.

[学科分类] 儿科学