Upon dividing preterm IL myometrium into those obtained from women with or without clinical evidence of chorioamnionitis, we detected significantly higher AKR1C1 mRNA abundance in samples obtained from women diagnosed with clinical chorioamnionitis (n=6) compared to women with no evidence of intrauterine inflammation (n=8) (p=0.0335) (Fig. 2). Here, AKR1C1 is linked to chorioamnionitis.