The Fetal and Neonatal Pulmonary Circulation

Birth is a sudden, traumatic transition of environments. Once the placental oxygen supply ceases, the foetus has only minutes to establish pulmonary oxygen transport, which requires not only inflation of the lungs, but also sudden and sustained changes in the lung circulation. Not long ago, research in this field was largely restricted to morphology and physiology. Now the powerful new tools of cellular and molecular biology have begun to
shed light on the physiological processes in the dev...