Making Sense of Pregnancy: What Experts Want you To Know About Your Body

Your menstrual cycle is the engine of reproduction and a window into your overall health.  It's critical both for a successful pregnancy, and can tell us things about your endocrine, metabolic, immune, and cardiac systems.  We have tended to look at things like how heavy or light the flow of your period is, or the length of the cycle as signs of wellness or distress in your system. But some r...

 This is a glimpse of our future through the lens of the menstrual cycle. Women, on average, experience about 400 cycles in their lives, and the process is integrally connected to many other features of your overall health and, of course, is critically important to a successful pregnancy. Using 3-D human organoids, Dr. Turco and her team test different facets of the cells of the uterine lining to...

 For all recorded time, the human menstrual cycle has been kind of a mystery. Is your period too long? Is your period too short? Are you bleeding too much? Is there too much pain?  It's hard to answer these questions because I'm not sure it makes sense to compare yourself to some, quote, "average woman," because the menstrual cycle is so integrally involved in so many different...

 Your menstrual cycle is incredibly important for your overall health and for your best chance at a successful pregnancy.  Creating a high-tech uterine lining each month that you will either continue to develop through a pregnancy or you'll eliminate if pregnancy isn't on the menu, is a biologically intensive and complex process. And there are a select few among all placental mammals who...

 In many things in life, timing matters.  That's also true in labor.  If we can align when we induce labor with what's known about the circadian rhythms of our body, we may be able to take advantage of times at which our bodies are more receptive to these interventions, and turn that advantage into shorter labors or fewer C-sections. Based on this retrospective study, these outcomes came...

 If I told you that I've heard of a free way  to reduce the length of labor, to reduce the C-section rate for those most at risk of a C section, all without increasing the risk for the baby, you'd likely tell me to sell my magic beans to someone else.  But labor and delivery do not arrive in a uniform way at all hours of the day. In fact, spontaneous labors tend to occur at night, with b...

 Miscarriage is very much a part of pregnancy. It's really common. Roughly 20% of implanted embryos are estimated to miscarry.  Unfortunately, stillbirth is also part of the process. The odds are 1 in 175.  But for most women who experience these outcomes, it feels like a shock, something you couldn't imagine would happen. In today's episode, I continue my conversation with Dr. Harv...

 Miscarriage is a well-known secret that you may not be aware of until it happens to you or to a close friend, but it's incredibly common.  Studies suggest something like 15 to 20% of recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage or stillbirth, with the vast majority of miscarriages happening in the first trimester, about 80%, and most stillbirths occurring in the third trimester.  Scientists hav...

 As scientists have come to learn more about serious pregnancy complications like preeclampsia and premature birth, they believe that some of those complicated issues are born in the very earliest days of pregnancy.  But the goings-on in the early first trimester have been a mystery for most of human history.  Recent technological advancements, like the special microscope used by the researcher I...

 We can initiate a pregnancy by handling eggs and sperm outside the human body. We can remove these elemental factors from people fundamentally changing the way eggs and sperm were built to interact and reinsert them into a woman's body to produce a pregnancy and eventually a baby.  It's an audacious and remarkable feat if you think about it, something that all generations of living crea...

 Question, are ovaries the most underrated organ? Answer: Yes. They're the workhorse of your menstrual cycle, this critical process that happens again and again and again to preserve your fertility, which may or may not be a top priority for you, but it is of top priority for the embryo that made you.  And today I'm gonna focus on this workhorse. Your ovaries, not only are they critical...

 Today we'll continue our conversation about Project Implantation.  In last week's episode, we were focused on how the model of the uterine lining was created and what it could do. This part of the conversation focuses more on what the blastoids, the embryo models and actual blastocysts (five day old embryos)  are doing with the model uterine lining.   Dr. Irene Zorzan is a postdoctoral...

Today we're going to talk about what I'm calling Project Implantation .  It's a bold experimental model that creates a 3D version of a uterine lining as it would exist during the window of implantation--that period in the cycle when you can actually get pregnant. This model, the first of its kind, is being used to better understand the hows of early placental construction:  how that...

 The sex of the fetus often isn't even mentioned until the 20 week scan, but as my conversation with Dr. Clifton suggests, fetal sex can have real impacts on how the fetus negotiates intrauterine life, especially if there are challenges. Today we talk about the ways in which fetal sex may affect how pregnancy complications are managed by the fetus and the placenta in the womb, in particular w...

 Lots of research has been done trying to understand how the human placenta is similar to and different from placentas of other mammals; to specifically tease out exactly how the placenta contributes to a pregnancy, and how its formation affects the success or failure of a pregnancy.  Another attribute of the placenta that's of increasingly recognized significance is the sex of the placenta a...

Postpartum depression is the most common complication of pregnancy. Given our current ability to measure it we think it will affect 10-15% of pregnancies, but it can be a tricky condition to diagnose because in the past, diagnosis has depended on the postpartum person answering a survey meant to identify it, or recognizing the condition in themselves and seeking help.  There are relatable reasons...

 One of the first things on an embryo's to-do list is to make a placenta, but to do this, it will need to work well with the decidual cells occupying the future Placenta construction site, otherwise known as the decidua or uterine lining that's beefed up for pregnancy. There are likely many contributors to this process, but how this negotiation goes down between a specific set of immune...

Although your OB usually doesn’t want to see you in the early weeks of pregnancy—there’s a lot going on that is of critical importance to the ease or complications of a pregnancy—specifically , the introduction of fetus to your uterine lining, and the subsequent merging, if implantation happens.  The weeks that follow are equally consequential. Exactly how those cells of your uterine lining negoti...

We are going to talk about the menstrual cycle, aka the result of the conversation between your brain, pituitary and ovaries that’s going on each months to create the conditions for you to build a human.  How does your body accomplish this amazing feat?  You likely experience your menstrual cycle, and your period in particular, as an inconvenience, but evolution put a lot of hard work into this pr...

Current statistics suggest that postpartum depression is one of the most common complications of pregnancy in the US, estimated at between 1 in 10 and 1 and 5 women--and this estimate is mostly based on the response to survey responses.   The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) is the most widely used screening tool for postpartum depression (PPD), recommended by ACOG, USPSTF, and PSI for...

 The very first construction project in pregnancy is the placenta. It's critical to the embryo's development, and problems with the placenta can have significant consequences for the baby. Since doctors have been able to identify fetal growth restriction in the course of pregnancy--which started in about the 1970s-- the medical response has been to prescribe bedrest and or early delivery...

 If you're listening to this episode on placental gene therapy, you may wanna sit down.  Today's guest walks us through a gene therapy that (a) doesn't change the chromosomal DNA of the mother or the fetus; that (b) can reverse (you heard that right)--REVERSE placental insufficiency after it has taken hold, and as if that weren't enough, (c) has successfully restored fetal weig...

 Many headlines exclaim the wonders of AI and medical research. What better place to leverage the advantages of AI than in research about pregnancy that positively impacts everyone's health, both in the present and the future? And by that I mean the mother and the baby during the pregnancy and the baby's health trajectory into the future--and maybe also the mothers as well.  Today's...

 Never before in the history of humanity have we been able to examine a pregnancy in process and predict the risk of conditions before clinical symptoms have developed. Even 10 years ago, if you told an OB that you could reliably predict which pregnant women were most likely to encounter preterm birth in their first pregnancy, you'd likely be written off as a kook. The power to predict compli...

 Looking through some of the research I highlighted on the podcast this year gives me a real sense of hope about the future of pregnancy, and I hope it does for you too.  There's good news and bad news. Let's get the bad news outta the way first. It's true that women's health has gotten the short end of the stick in terms of federal funding and research interest for far too lon...