Women with Turner's syndrome should be carefully followed throughout life. Growth hormone therapy should be started at age 2-5 years. Hormone replacement therapy for the development of normal female sexual characteristics should be started at age 12-15 years and continued for the long term to prevent coronary artery disease and osteoporosis. Most women with Turner's syndrome have ovarian dysgenesis; therefore, they are usually infertile, and in very rare cases have spontaneous menses followed by early menopause. Only 2% of the women have natural pregnancies, with high rates of miscarriages, stillbirths and malformed babies. Their pregnancy rate in oocyte donation programmes is 24-47%, but even these pregnancies have a high rate of miscarriage, probably due to uterine factors. A possible future prospect is cryopreservation of ovarian tissue containing immature follicles before the onset of early menopause, but methods of replantation and in-vitro maturation still need to be developed. Should these autologous oocytes indeed be used in the future, affected women would need to undergo genetic counselling before conception, followed by prenatal assessment.

The effect of uterine leiomyoma on infertility is subject to controversy. Two main mechanisms associating leiomyomata and infertility have been suggested: the obstruction of gamete transport and impaired implantation. In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is a unique setting for examining the effect of leiomyomata on the implantation rate. This study was designed to determine the impact of uterine leiomyomata on the results of IVF. In a retrospective analysis of IVF cycles, 46 women with documented uterine leiomyoma were compared with a control group with mechanical infertility. The implantation rate and pregnancy outcome in relation to the leiomyoma were observed. Implantation (22.1%/transfer, 6.8%/embryo) and abortion rates (36%) in the study group were similar to the results in the control group with pure mechanical factor. An analysis of IVF results according to the hysteroscopic pretreatment findings revealed that impaired implantation is associated with leiomyoma only where uterine intracavitary abnormalities co-exist. We conclude that implantation rate and pregnancy outcome are impaired in women with uterine leiomyomata only when they cause deformation of the uterine cavity. In patients with leiomyomata associated with an abnormal uterine cavity, surgical treatment should be considered prior to IVF because of the reduced implantation rate.

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Tumor necrosis factor (TNF-a), a I7 kDa cytokine, is a product of activated macrophages which was recently shown to be produced by rat and bovine Igranulosa cells. In the present work, human granulosa cells derived from preovulatory follicles were used, It was demonstrated that human granulosa cells produce. TNF-u (510 units/300000 cells per 15 h). This production was increased by addition of follicle-stimulating hormone or by a combination of human chorionic gonadotrophin and CSF to the culture media. TNF was also found in bovine follicular fluid and the concentration was higher in the periovulatory than mid-cycle follicles. TNF-a was found to increase prostaglandin F-2a production by human granulosa cells (P< 0.001). We conclude that granulosa cells are both a source and target organ for TNF-a.