(Taken from the application): The goal of this conference is to present new work on the biology of pregnancy and of common rheumatic diseases and to develop new research directions. There are five specific aims for the proposed efforts.
Aim 1. To describe rheumatic diseases related to pregnancy in terms of the biology of pregnancy. In the past several years extensive new discoveries concerning the organ, cell, and molecular biology of pregnancy have been published. Many of these findings are directly relevant to the pathogenesis of rheumatic diseases and others to the pathology of abnormal pregnancy.
Aim 1 will describe these findings and relate them to rheumatic illnesses. Topics to be covered include: microchirnerism, HLA, and other material-fetal interactions; implantation and early pregnancy immunology; placental biology and immunology; cytokine, coagulation, and other topics relevant to biology; and hormones and disease modulation.
Aim 2. To present new biology of specific problems with well-studied pathogeneses. Considerable new information is available regarding neonatal lupus and antiphospholipid antibody.
In Aim 2, new information will be presented to address what the known mechanisms teach us about rheumatic diseases and about pregnancy.
Aim 3. To define consensus measurements criteria for fetal and maternal outcomes.
This aim will focus on the science of clinical measurements during pregnancy and on the development of consensus answers to the (whole patient) questions: simultaneous measurement of disease activity and of pregnancy complications; biology of pre-eclampsia in rheumatic diseases; and short- and long-term fetal outcomes.
Aim 4. To pose pregnancy questions in the context of the biology of gender. As a general rule, issues of the biology of pregnancy have not been considered as issues of gender, yet the topic of female predominance in rheumatic disease is widely debated.
This aim will present new information on gender that is largely published in the literature of molecular genetics and endocrinology, to introduce the relevance of this topic to the study of pathologic pregnancy.
Aim 5. To present a forum for discussion of important clinical topics. Although this conference is not primarily a clinical conference, much new information is available. Thus, this aim will provide an opportunity to discuss new treatment trials, pregnancy in rare rheumatic diseases, and miscellaneous topic in free papers.
