[Relationships between the macroscopic placentary condition and postnatal state of underweight neonates. A contribution to the correlational pathology of the placenta (author's transl)].

Results of macroscopic examinations of placentae, which were obtained under routine clinical conditions for a total of 615 underweight neonates, were checked for their capability of a respiratory distress syndrome, and perinatal mortality. Evidence was obtained for a (partially statistically significant) trend showing that, within individual gestatory age groups and for equal weights of babies, premature infants born in the period up to and including the thirty-fifth week of gestation and having relatively low placental weights premature babies born during the thirty-sixth week of pregnancy, and hypotrophic babies born at term and showing a relatively heigh weight of the placenta are particularly exposed to a number of dangers in the further postnatal course of life. The clinical importance of these results to attending neonatologists is pointed out. Other conditions. such as the form of attachment of the umbilical cord of the nature of allantochorial vasculature, were not found to be closely related to the parameters studied in this investigation.